


Not Even Stars

by nodere



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Reconciliation, SHEITH - Freeform, allurance, post-season 8, to say it derailed is a kindness undeserved so I decided to put it back on track
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-06-09 23:45:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19486420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nodere/pseuds/nodere
Summary: The last princess of Altea’s ruling dynasty sacrificed her life for the preservation of this reality and every other, reweaving broken threads, rebuilding from the rubble of a ten-thousand years war.The former paladins have gone their separate ways, all in the name of that ever elusive and intangible “happiness.”When Pidge picks up the radiation signature of a new transreality rift, she decides there are better ways of confronting the problem than going through the bureaucracy of the newly formed Galactic Coalition. A darkness still remains in the farthest reaches of the ever-expanding universe, consuming all that lay in its path.The Paladins’ work remains incomplete.Season 8 happened. This is the story of what happens next.





	1. Passing Muster

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I could not force myself to re-watch S8, so where my memory blacked things out, I just made stuff up (or checked episode transcripts). This is me protecting my sanity. 
> 
> I wrote this because I needed closure.
> 
> Enjoy! <3

###  I.

Pidge pulled her hand away from the buzzer and stepped back, the obnoxious hum still ringing in her ears. She adjusted her rucksack and tapped her foot, huffing the air through her nose as she waited for someone to answer the door. No reply. The person she sought had entered several hours earlier and she’d been casing the place nearly all day. She curled her fingers into a fist and banged on the hard, composite surface. Still nothing. Puffing her cheeks, she pressed the buzzer again, holding her finger to the button until her knuckles turned white, and after another lengthy wait, it chimed back.

“Hey. It’s me,” she barked into the speaker. “Open up!”

“Pidge?” came a groggy reply.

“Who else?”

Nearly a minute later, the door slid aside and Hunk stood before her, mouth wide in a yawn, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. His hair stuck out like a dandelion gone to seed, and his rumpled pajamas evinced a night of restless sleep. He looked pale and unwell, but as Pidge had noted, all the paladins had when she'd last seen them, when the Lions had left, when the future had seemed almost darker and bleaker than it had before they’d “saved” it.

Pidge always thought of it that way now and made finger quotes when she spoke of it so anyone watching would know exactly what she meant. Some things seemed worse now than they had before. Perspective made the claim undeniably subjective.

She had never imagined it would be like  _ this _ . The heroes had won, and that act in itself should have earned them their happiness, but war only takes. Even now, that stark truth caught her unaware. Lance had gone back to his parent’s farm. It was what everyone expected, he’d said. Shiro, once the Galaxy Garrison’s rising star had given up his rank and the highest command they had to offer. Keith, well, he might have been anywhere in the universe doing who knows what, having so completely distanced himself from the rest of the paladins. Then there was Hunk, working himself down like a dog from dusk to dawn in the embassy kitchens at Galactic Coalition headquarters, formerly the Galaxy Garrison.

It had been too long since she had seen them. She wished she came bearing better tidings.

Pidge had left her work under cover of “not feeling well,” which wasn't exactly a lie. What she had uncovered had made her more than a little queasy. She had arrived back on Earth earlier in the day, unannounced except to air and space traffic control under an assumed name hoping to avoid notice. She had wanted to see her friend immediately but decided instead to wait. In all his letters and communiques she had sensed something off, and she wanted to learn what it was, knowing that if she asked him directly, he'd just brush it off the way he always did when it came to personal matters. She holed herself up in her rented quarters nearby and tapped into the GC security system, following Hunk through his duties on her tablet. From the time she started observing him, he only left the kitchens at lunch, making a break for the adjacent airfield where he walked the line of ships in the hangar and watched as air and spacecraft landed, received by welcoming parties of smiling faces with trays of his hors-d'oeuvres likely prepared by his staff in his kitchen. The lump in Pidge's throat hitched when he placed his hands upon one of the retired fighter jets, bringing back old memories of their training together at the former military institute and dusting them off again almost to spite her. They'd never made it to real flight, having passed too few of the simulations with Lance at the helm, she’d been sure they were going to fail, and then came Voltron and it suddenly no longer mattered.

When his half-hour was up, Hunk returned to his cookies or whatever he’d been making.

He went dutifully through the motions, but there was more to a repast than just the food. It breaks the ice but doesn’t melt it. They got the meal but not the heart. What good is it without the heart?

Sustenance, Pidge had answered herself, but people like Hunk didn’t cook out of necessity. She’d watched for the rest of the afternoon

He still had Romelle in the kitchens, but Sal and the rest of his crew had moved on. Sometimes, he had told her in his letters, Coran would come by.

_ Coran. _

Pidge didn’t want to think about that.

Him.

_ That. _

Coran had been robbed of the opportunity to tell  _ Allura _ goodbye.

Pidge’s mind reeled.  _ One thing at a time. _

“What are you doing here?” Hunk hissed. “It’s three o’clock in the morning!” He stepped aside and tried to usher her in.

She didn’t move.

Rifling through her pack, she pulled out a small sealed envelope and handed it to him.

With narrowed eyes, he took it, staring at the blank, pale yellow expanse and turned it over. Blank on both sides.

“Read this, then we’ll talk.”

“At least come inside,” Hunk flipped the letter over again in his hand as she stepped in. He shut the door behind her, throwing the lock as she kicked off her shoes.

Pidge followed along to his living room and dropped into a chair as Hunk tapped the lamp on the small table beside her, filling the space around them with dim, warm light. She pulled her knees up onto the cushion and wrapped her arms around her legs, though Hunk remained standing. Carefully, he opened the letter and unfolding it, began to read.

When he finished, he set the paper down on the table and sat in the chair on its opposite side. For a long while, he gazed at the floor where the plush, rust-colored carpet sprang up like tufts of dormant grass between his bare toes.

She didn’t press him, knowing she asked a lot.

Eventually, he spoke, still staring at his feet. “Okay. I’m in.”

Pidge hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath, but when she sighed relief, a great weight lifted from her shoulders. She had kept the knowledge of her discovery close and finally having another person to share it with eased some of that burden. Her purpose here tonight had been twofold: share that information with Hunk, and convince him to come with her.

_ Effortless. _

“Tell me how you found the signal.”

“I copied the data on the entity that my father had collected before Allura absorbed it into herself, and I went through it piece by piece. The thing is, no one has studied these beings. We know nothing about them except that they exist. We don’t even know if they’re sentient.”

Hunk frowned, processing her words, as she continued.

“Something I remembered from the Olkari is that all life resonates uniquely with the universe. No two patterns are ever alike. So, I decided to look for the pattern within the limited data I had, and I found it. From there, I just had to modify one of the receivers at the station to start a search. When I picked it up, because it was definitely out there, it wasn’t from Daibazaal, where we might have expected it, or the burial grounds where Zarkon was laid to rest, or Oriande where the Altean colony had moved. The coordinates point toward the Quantum Abyss. It’s like something is leaking out of the very fabric of space and time.”

Hunk bent over his lap, elbows propped on his knees and head in his hands. “I knew it wasn’t over. I knew it wouldn’t be enough.”

She reached over to rub his back, her mouth a thin-set line carved across her face. This was going to be harder than she thought.

_ One down, three to go. _

###  II.

Shiro set his phone face down on the counter, on top of the tablet containing his divorce papers. Curtis had sent it over weeks ago and instead of signing the damned things and getting this terrible ordeal over with, he had instead promptly set it aside for later. He leaned over the counter and blew his bangs out of his eyes. All of this was his fault, and not even his therapist had been able to convince him otherwise.

Curtis said that meant he needed a new therapist.

What did he know anyway? Shiro didn’t run himself ragged through the list again, but it started with “captured by aliens” and sailed right on past “drove my best friend over half-way across the known universe.” If, of course, he still had a best friend. Somewhere in the middle, he had released the captured Sendak in a moment of visceral anguish, leading directly to the conquest of Earth just a few years later. Admiral Takashi “Five Bars” Shirogane was, albeit indirectly, responsible for all the devastation wreaked by that one choice, a snap decision made in the heat of an emotional breakdown.

And Curtis called him constipated.

But it wasn’t all Shiro’s fault. He was old enough to know there are always multiple sides to everything, every hurt, every smile, his own happiness. At the same time, while Curtis had never told him, he knew who had sent the unencrypted signal out into the cosmos on every channel, every frequency, through all the means available, and primitive though it was, Sendak, whom Shiro had single-handedly returned to the game that adults called war, had responded to that call.

Sam had told him. 

Shiro started to laugh as he thought about it, but the laughter dissolved into wracking sobs, hitching in his throat until they became great gobs of salty water dribbling down his face in mirthless tears. He buried his face in his arms, shaking, unable to stop himself. How had this happened? How had it happened to him? All the residual guilt bore him down beneath its load as he toiled day in and day out. Those heavy feelings making it that much more difficult to get up in the morning. Who could see through his facade, through the lie that he was living? Did anyone even care? 

No. 

He knew all too well that the world was oblivious to him. But that didn’t matter. It would take so little to shatter everything at his feet, and he had no one left to help pick up the pieces.

What he really wanted right now was a friend. He wondered what Keith was up to. 

Retirement fit him like the ill-tailored suit he’d worn at his own wedding. 

That might have been the last time he’d seen Keith. They certainly hadn’t spoken.

Curtis didn’t like it when he talked about Keith.

Curtis this…

Curtis that…

Curtis.

It didn’t matter. Curtis was gone.

He could wallow in his sorrows later. Pidge would arrive soon, and he hadn’t showered in days. Why hadn’t he thought of her just now? She was certainly his friend, although instead of welcoming her intrusion, he had instead tried to stave off the inevitable encounter. He’d had no success.

Pidge’s persistence culled the weak and drove the strong back into a corner.

Shiro needed to crawl out of that corner.

Her visit gave him a reason to care. Besides, he wasn’t doing  _ that _ poorly. Well, he was, and his clothing told that tale. Living in joggers and tank tops hadn’t been good for him. His pants clung too tightly, riding up where they shouldn’t and chafing in places he lacked the imagination to consider. His shirts pulled beneath his arms and around his stomach. Dressing was a hassle though, requiring removal of the collar fitted to what remained of his right shoulder. Nothing stretched over it; everything had to see a tailor just to fit around. He appreciated Allura’s gift, yet while loathe to admit any inconvenience, he occasionally considered a trip to Daibazaal for a more practical replacement.

Then he could give the power source to Coran, who had nothing to remember her by.

Keith, however, had claimed Daibazaal as his stomping ground, and as far as Shiro was concerned, that made it off-limits. Keith had made it abundantly clear that he did not wish to be hassled. By him or anyone else. Maybe Pidge could help him out, but he wouldn’t want her to think he only entertained her company when he needed something.

Then again, wasn’t that why she was coming to see him?

Shiro opened the door immediately when it rang, sucking in his gut and trying his best to appear comfortable in his skin despite the sensation of it being stretched taut over his frame and packed past full with millions of ugly feelings that only served to make him look like a bootleg version of himself. Overdone, thoroughly washed up. The action figure with the half-melted face, the eyes placed too low and the goofy grin. Shiro the Hero™. He reached up for his glasses, thinking they were on his head where he usually left them, only to realize he’d hidden them in the medicine cabinet.

Pidge did not recoil when he opened the door, but her gaze scoured the topography of his landscape, making him acutely aware of his shortcomings. After a pause so pregnant he feared what it might birth, she exhaled and lunged forward, attacking him with a hug so savagely genuine he thought his heart would burst. It made him feel soft again, holding her close, and the waterworks would have recommenced if he hadn’t already run the reservoir dry.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

_ At least somebody has. _

“I’ve missed you too.”

His place was something of a disaster. He'd never unpacked from the move-out—marching orders served—and lived day to day out of boxes and suitcases. Dishes piled on the coffee table with crusty trays left over from ready-to-eat mac and cheese and empty barrels that once housed thousands of those delicious Day-glo orange cheese puffs. He pretended not to notice that some of it had even started to grow as he cleared a path and brushed crumbs and things off the futon, Pidge on his tail, tiptoeing around the wreckage of his perfect life.

They settled on the lumpy mattress, Pidge with her shoes still on, not daring to take them off. He didn’t blame her; he wore gray socks for a reason.

And then he remembered Pidge had always been the resident filth gremlin. She probably didn’t care.

She handed him a violet envelope with no external markings and stared expectantly at him until he opened it.

“You’re positive?” he asked after reading through the contents, holding the soft, creamy letter paper close to his face in order to read her scrawl that looked like a hatching of spiders had been pressed into rows across the page. He’d probably have looked less stupid had he just worn the damned glasses.

“Yes,” she returned, cool as could be.

“Then I’ll find us a ship. No guarantees it’ll be a luxury ride.” An excursion with Pidge to take care of some unfinished Voltron business might actually do him some good, and he surprised himself by agreeing with her assessment of the Galactic Coalition. The leaders would argue over who got the expeditionary crew until they agreed to share the work and by that time, who knew what the situation would be—if there were any danger to it—a risk he did not wish to take.

“That’s fine. My pilot can fly anything.”

His hope fell when she said that. He’d hoped it would be him. “I thought-”

“Keith.”

Shiro relaxed back into the uncomfortable mattress with a sigh and folded his arms over his chest. “He agreed?”

“Not yet.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Do you even know where he is?” Shiro asked, suddenly aware of the fact that even should he want to, he had no way of contacting Keith.

“Nope,” Pidge replied, picking up one of the plastic barrels and shaking the remaining stale puffs around the bottom. She plucked one out, chewed, and spat it back in, screwing up her face and frowning at it. “Blech!”

###  III.

Lance lay sprawled over a bed of blooming clover while the sheep grazed in the meadow below his hillside perch. The dogs did most of the hard labor, but someone had to call them back at the end of the day.

Today. 

_ This _ day.

He fingered the soft cotton paper as he read, following the horizontal and vertical impressions of the laid and chain lines—so old-fashioned and so unlike Pidge. “After everything she sacrificed, the entity is still here,” he mused, more tired than anything else, his emotional capacity having maxxed out long ago, much like the rest of him.

That the world remained a messed up place was not a new revelation to Lance. He had tried so hard,  _ struggled _ , to reach his goals. The Galaxy Garrison had accepted him by the skin of his teeth, the second in his family to attend an academy, right after his older sister. His scores, generally average, placed him in transportation, learning the ins and outs of cargo craft until a spot opened up in fighter class. From there it was Voltron. He  _ could _ fly, but between the star golden boy, an ace-in-the-hole pilot, an engineer, and a technical wizard, no place existed for a merely average pilot. He could shoot a rifle though, a skill his grandfather had taught him as a child and one sometimes needed on a farm. In the end, the farm had called him home. At least here he could escape the curse of mediocrity. He'd always be the farm boy from Cuba.

Glancing over at Pidge, he watched her gnaw on a blade of grass, eyes fixed on the tufts of white clouds suspended in a sea of blue, drifting slowly past.

“I’m not sure that’s entirely correct,” Pidge said. “It seems more likely to have originated from a new rift in this reality. The one in Daibazaal no longer exists. The hole torn by the transreality comet was repaired, but knowing of two such tears in a universe as vast as ours? Think about it. Ninety-six percent of space is empty, and I’m not sure how we’d even begin to keep track of it all.”

“That can’t be right” Lance raised himself up on his elbows, the marks on his cheekbones shimmered a silvery, iridescent blue beneath the summer sun. “Allura wouldn’t re-make a world where we’d have to do it all again. Without the Lions.” He stopped before he said the rest.

_ Without her. _

_ Allura. _ At first, he had cursed himself and his awkwardness. It should have been so easy to talk to her, it had been once he’d stopped trying too hard, but the residual insecurities of his young heart had gotten in the way. In hindsight, he should have told her sooner how he felt. Maybe that would have given him more time.

_ Them.  _ He and Allura.

Given  _ them _ more time.

Wasn’t time supposed to heal? He wondered how long it would take, or if, perhaps, it would last forever.

“She put the world back together, but not without bias,” Pidge turned her gaze toward him. “Altea was made anew and Daibazaal after ten thousand years. But Olkarion is still gone, countless lives lost and ruined throughout the galaxies.”

“So, why did you come here if you’re just going to bad-mouth Allura?”

“I’m not bad-mouthing anybody. Nobody’s perfect.”

Lance did not entirely disagree, though it still left a sour taste in his mouth. “I can’t help you. My parents need me here. With my grandparents gone, Veronica with the Coalition, and Marco moving out with his family, somebody’s got to help hold down the fort here. We’ll have to harvest the summer crops soon and prepare for fall plantings and turnover. Why don’t you ask Keith to help you? Or Shiro?” Lance searched her amber eyes, hoping they hadn’t turned her down. Third or fourth choice was low. “I’m sure Hunk would. If you asked.”

“I’ve already asked Hunk and Shiro. They’re on board. I’d like you to join us. I’d like Keith to as well, but I don’t know where he is.”

Lance’s mouth twitched in amusement as he settled back into the clover and folded his arms behind his head. He did know where Keith was. He knew where they all were and found it curiously strange that Pidge did not, then again, he had spent time listening. He had not chosen the quintessence bond, but neither could he rid himself of its influence. Even Shiro, who posited that his connection with the Black Lion had been severed at the root remained within Lance's sphere of observation. Keith may have been particularly sensitive to the bonds, but the rest of them could learn, that much Lance knew. “You don’t need me.”

“Yes, I do. We can get some programmable AI to help your family out while you’re gone. My mom has been working on that, better ways to feed a population that sort of thing. Significant swaths of arable land were completely demolished, and we've lost a good portion of the farming community who knew how to bring a crop to fruition and harvest efficiently. I’m sure she’d embrace the opportunity to work with your family.”

He raised a brow. “It’s really not necessary. I’m not going.”

“We need you!” She sat bolt upright and stared indignantly at him as if he were the one causing trouble.

“Right, you need Lance the stupid one, Lance the seventh wheel, Lance the worst pilot  _ ever _ , Lance-”

“Shut up!” She yelled over him, rubbing at the bridge of her nose.

Every misstep he had ever made, every foible, every embarrassing thing he had ever done, ever wrong word, all the way to that place where he had let the one he thought he loved walk away to her own end.

“Why? Nothing I ever did was enough.” Lance struggled to get the words out, swallowing hard and closing his eyes. “I never belonged at the Garrison or out there with the rest of you. I should have stayed here. Maybe it would have turned out differently.” He sniffled, trying to keep the floodgates closed, but he hadn't had a good cry in too long, and the tears ran down the sides of his face while he lay there.

“What are you even talking about? You were always a better pilot than me or Hunk, Shiro trusted you-”

She was not wrong. Shiro  _ had _ trusted him, just like Allura, and he’d let both of them down. He pulled himself upright, forehead to his knees, and folded his arms over his head, clutching at the neck of his shirt. All of those negative thoughts came tumbling back. Keith had removed himself entirely to give Lance a chance. A chance he’d botched completely over Shiro of all people. He had heard Shiro’s call from the astral plane, and he hadn’t been able to reach him. The clone, a hapless soul in perfect replica body, had confided in him and yet he had done nothing but wallow in jealous angst over Allura's dalliance with Lotor. “I couldn't- I couldn't even-” His words dissolved to the strangled sound of an injured beast.

“Stop acting like you’re the only one who hurts! Why do you think you’re the only one to blame?” Pidge exclaimed, offering none of the expected comfort. “We were so divided we didn’t even realize it until she was gone! We didn’t even consider other options! Voltron itself was a being of multiple realities and possibilities. What if we could have used it, traded Voltron, or, oh, I don’t know! But don’t act like all the blame lies on you, Lance McClain.”

“Keith summed it up quite nicely when we were out there in space, together, waiting to die. Remember that? ‘Are we even friends?’ he said.”

Pidge held her tongue.

“Well, are we?”

“Why else would I be here? Of course, I can do this without you, but I don’t  _ want _ to. Do you get that? This is important! We’re the only ones who know what we’re dealing with and whose connection to the reality the entities came from is still stronger than a memory. We need to know what the threat is. We can’t allow what happened before to start all over again. Don’t you get that? This is bigger than you. We need each other. You lifted us up when we needed it most, you always did, and I need you now, for who and what you are, with all your flaws. Maybe we didn’t pick each other back then, but I’m choosing you now.  _ We _ need you.”

She had a point.

He struggled to compose himself, wiping his face on his sleeve. “I’ll think about it.”

Pidge frowned. "It'll be good for us to be together. We shared something special, the six of us. No one else can ever know it, and no one can take it away."

”You think? Nothing’s ever really constant in life, you know. Not even stars.”

###  IV.

Most of the time, Keith’s head wasn’t even a place he liked to be, so he parceled up and packaged the unpleasant thoughts then set them aside to deal with later. His colleagues had all gone their separate ways. Shiro, always a dynamo, had thrown himself into his work. Captain of the Atlas, no, Admiral now. Admiral Shirogane, Keith corrected himself, of the Atlas, First Fleet of the Galactic Coalition. He had to admit, thinking about it filled him with a swell of pride for Shiro’s accomplishments. It came to him as relief that Shiro had once again found purpose in life, even if that left no room for him. Yet still, that stagnancy in what had once been his most precious friendship felt like nothing less than rejection.

It  _ was _ rejection. Usually, when you tell someone you love them, any response at all, even the static hiss of a lousy signal, is better than radio silence.

Shiro didn’t need him, and so he had retreated to the Blade, propped in front of the Kral Zera with Kolivan and his own mother beside him, like some new puppet prince, a half-Galra who looked so unassumingly human no one truly believed it.

_ Ridiculous. _

He laughed at himself as much as they laughed at him.

With no desire to prove anything, Keith had eventually arrived at the reconstruction and reunification efforts of a very fractured Galra people. It helped that they had a significant number of full-blooded Galra participating in the effort. The few rebellions and skirmishes that did occur were immediately put down or died quickly with supply chains cut and power grids out.

Maintaining infrastructure had proven to be crucially important in keeping the former empire from collapsing into complete chaos. In the past, enslavement of the conquered planets came just before absorption by the Galra Empire. The new order strove to move the now freed people toward self-rule; however, careful diplomacy was necessary to ensure not only survival of these planets but their transition from tyranny to something more closely resembling a democracy.

Was that even the right thing to do?

He had never belonged on Earth, and politics aside, he would never belong here either.

A part of Keith wished he could just ascend to the astral plane and have it done with. Above his prone form, the ever eclipsing sun would rise high above him, bathing him in its ultraviolet light until it consumed him entirely.

And burned him out.

_ Pathetic. _

When the quintessence bond picked up Pidge, in fluctuations that came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide, he could hardly contain his surprise. He had spent countless hours and sleepless nights wishing that bond away, yet it only strengthened his grip as if his attempts to block it out only made it stronger. 

Pidge arrived at the royal airfield on Daibazaal in a ramshackle transporter that looked less than space-worthy. She hopped out of the cockpit and scanned the tarmac, waving excitedly when she spotted him.

At a glance, he saw her energy, and in seeing it, he could feel it, the surge of her residual quintessence from exposure to others with it. If he squinted into her aura, it shone vividly, gold, violet, and blue, radiating from her natural green glow. His connection, so very strong at the end of their final fight had received its first blow with Allura's sacrifice, the second when the Lions left, the initial shock approaching withdrawal sickness. He hadn’t been able to move off the floor for three days at peak intensity, with cold sweats and sharp shivers coursing through his joints. He had screamed his throat raw but could not force himself to drink or eat. Recovery happened, but it had taken time.

And here Pidge came running full tilt toward him, knowing despite the senior Blade uniform with the mask on and hood up, that it was him.

He caught her, grunting at the sudden embrace and squeezing her tight before letting go.

“Only one person I know looks that surly just standing in one place,” she said, as if in answer to his unspoken question as she stepped back and composed herself.

He wiped away the mask and rolled his eyes, wry smile on his lips. “All right, you found me. What do you want?”

“Is there a place we can talk?” she asked, stuffing her hands into her pockets.

“Yes,” he said. “The gardens.”

Nothing could have prepared Keith for the Galra imperial palace the first time he saw it. Every Galra ship he had been on, every base infiltrated had been a hulking monumental structure. Cold, impressive, bearing down on everyone within and without. None of it bore resemblance what he’d find on Daibazaal. Here, the grand buildings reached for the heights toward their star with columns tapering up, simple but elegant buttressing allowing the airy structured to climb with gold-crowned pinnacles and crisp, clean surfaces. It reminded Keith of the castle ship and the places he had visited on Altea as part of the Galra ambassador’s entourage. The influence of their neighbors seemed likely, nurtured by history and friendship between the two nations long before the rift appeared. With the corruption of the emperor, came the subsequent perversion of everything the Galra had been, from their ideology all the way down to the structures they built.

The architect had constructed a courtyard of suspended gardens, tiers of floral greenery spiraled up from the center of the room in rectangular hedges accessible by a floating staircase that gave with the pressure of each footfall and—if one wasn’t careful—returned in a nauseating rebound. Narrow paths and side trails steered the visitor all the way to the top along a meandering path. The reason Keith picked it, however, had nothing to do with the beauty of the place. The acoustics of the room allowed for private conversations to remain closed in a place of watchful eyes and ever-listening ears.

Regardless, the courtyard was vacant when they arrived. Together, they started up the steps, thick plates, clear as glass and just barely wide enough for the two of them.

She handed him a letter, and as they climbed the stairs, he read it.

“I’m looking for a pilot,” she finally said.

He glanced over at her. She’d grown. Not much, probably just an inch or two, but he suspected she finally broke 5 feet. How long had it been since he’d last seen her? Shiro’s wedding? They hadn’t spoken, but he’d only shown up for the ceremony anyway. Two and a half years maybe? Long enough for him to bury himself in long strings of one-night stands and flings to fill his empty heart because he still hadn’t checked out of the hotel Shirogane.

The thought came bubbling up from out of nowhere. He squashed it down again.

“Why do you need a pilot?” he asked, still considering all those missteps that had gotten him to this place. “You can fly.”

“I don’t know my way through the Quantum Abyss.”

Keith pressed his lips together. “And what do you need to navigate that mess for?”

“I tracked the entity there. Well, when I traced its harmonic signature, I found it coming from that sector.”

“I see. So instead of alerting any sort of authority, you instead come to me.” He narrowed his eyes, the aura told him exactly where she’d been. “After you’ve already approached Hunk, Shiro, and Lance.”

Pidge gnawed at the inside of her cheek.

“You don’t just think the entity is out there, do you? It’s something else. Maybe there’s a chance Allura’s still here. It’s her signature too.” In a way. “There have to be more powerful things in this universe than the broken and waning quintessence bond of a bunch of former addicts.”

In retrospect, Voltron hadn’t been some fine wine of the privileged class, it was the cheap stuff from the corner store, only good for cooking and maybe a buzz, but only after two bottles in.

“You’re not as dense as you lead people to believe.”

He glared at her, blinking, and suddenly burst into full-bodied laughter. “Wow. You’re still a real charmer.”

“I know,” she said and hip-checked him as they climbed higher.

Keith thought about it for a moment. “Get a wormhole, Pidge. It’ll be easier.”

The truth was he did not want to set one toe back inside the Quantum Abyss. Sure, he could fly anything through it, that he did not doubt, but in the course of a few weeks, he had lost two years of his life. Approximately, he assumed. It wasn't entirely clear, and instrumentation couldn't accurately measure anything in there off the beaten path.

“We don’t have enough data to ensure success margins. The universe is, well, different. It wasn’t remade the same. I’d rather have a pilot.”

“You already have Shiro. I can provide you with the coordinates, but you have to remember that things change in there all the time. You can’t navigate the abyss on autopilot, sensors don’t function properly. I have work to do here.”

“What work, Keith? You refused a cabinet position, as far as I’ve been able to dig up, which isn’t much - you’re good at hiding - you have few friends, Kolivan and your mother are off, together, I might add on a mission to secure the remaining Zaiforge technology on Senfama. Aren’t you bored?”

“Yes!” he cried, exasperated. “I mean, no.”

Pidge giggled. “You are the worst liar.”

Hope. The genuine thing, the real deal. He saw it when he looked at her. At the wedding, he’d seen them all put on their false faces for Shiro. He hadn’t been the only one thinking it strange that once best friend would throw it in with that guy on his bridge less than six months after Haggar’s defeat. To Keith, it felt desperate, the move of someone who wanted a new thing to fill a vacancy in an ever-ambitious spirit. He had never asked what the rest of them had felt, but he the disturbances in the quintessence bonds, faint as they were, had been present even then.

And now that bond reared its ugly head with little pulses even as he looked at Pidge standing expectantly beside him.

“I’m staying put,” he finally said.

“But Keith-”

“No buts. If Allura is out there, she’s not going to want to see me, or any of us, most likely. She’s transcended into something other than what she was. And if you think you can just jump into the void and find her-" A lump formed in his throat and he swallowed it down. He had done that to Shiro, his grief so strong it had thrown him right out of this tangible reality and into the astral plane. When he had returned, armed with the knowledge of where Shiro had been, no one had stopped to ask the question, what did Shiro want?

He could not help but think there was some residual animosity leftover from the whole ordeal directed at him, that he had been so needy as to bring Shiro back, get Allura to stuff him into that clone body, and then, as if it were the end of all things, bring him back to life.

Keith had wanted it, but he had never thought to ask what Shiro wanted. 

_ Selfish. _

The only person he had to blame for his unhappiness was himself. Once past the grim reality of his mother’s abandonment and the tragedy of his father’s death, much of his life had been that way.

Pidge stopped. They had reached the top. She pivoted on her heel, a full about-face, and took in the sight, lips parted and eyes wide with wonder. Keith had been here numerous times and did not need to look to know what she saw, but for her, it must have been breathtaking. Vines and tendrils crawled over the sides of the boxes, flowering in blossoms of pink and violet with silvery leaves coated in soft down. Petals littered the transparent surface beneath their feet and when they moved, brushed off, floating down to the polished metal floor below. Keith looked for a bench and sat down.

“I had no idea…” Pidge surveyed the courtyard from the apex of the garden, like a queen over her vassals.

“That Galra have nice things too? Yeah.” Keith stretched his legs out and tilted his head back the weight of his hair pulling it down. “They do.”

“They?” she asked with the keen, needling curiosity of a cat.

Keith had said it, and he couldn't take it back now.  _ They _ . As if there were no better way to describe his otherness, the exact thing most Galra saw when someone introduced him: Keith Kogane, Former Paladin of the Black Lion, half-Galra.

What did that even mean?

_ They. _

“I’ll think about it,” he finally relented, no longer able to justify staying here even to himself. The reconstruction efforts would continue with or without him.

Three weeks later, Pidge informed Keith of her return, and he agreed to meet her, waiting on the tarmac with his pack.

Pidge climbed out, followed by Hunk, Lance, and finally Shiro.

When he saw Shiro, he froze, staring at this shadow of the man he’d known, sloppy, overweight, needing something more than the clean-up job of a shave and a haircut. A shock of pain ran through his jaw, and he unclenched his teeth, forcing himself to breathe, searching those warm gray eyes for something, anything they might reveal. Keith told himself to stop being stupid. What had he expected anyway?

He didn’t know, but neither had he ever thought that when he’d given his heart away, it would have been so thoroughly discarded and trampled. It still hadn’t mended fully. Even now, no one compared to Shiro. No one compared to Shiro’s shadow. The thought made him scoff at himself with disgust, he grimaced and averted his eyes, moving along past Lance and into the shuttlecraft.


	2. Expedition

### I.

Lance whistled, cringing as Keith brushed past his shoulder. He glanced at Shiro. “Wow.”

Shiro shrank back into himself. The utter scorn and disgust with which Keith had looked at him tore at the very core of his soul. He’d known he’d have to face it, face Keith, face himself, instead of discarding his emotions as weak and short-sighted. No time had ever been the right time, life came at him all at once, all the time. They fought a war. He had died, his soul stuck in perpetuity, alone in the void until Keith had dragged him out of it.

And the memories of it all remained. Of not being himself, becoming Honerva’s pawn, the horror of trying to destroy the one person who had never given up on him.

_“As many times as it takes.”_

Was that a lie?

_WAKE UP!_

Sometimes he awoke in the middle of the night, screaming Keith's name, bedsheets soaked as he shivered in a cold sweat. In his worst nightmares, he killed Keith outright, in the better ones, he struggled against the hand gripped tightly around his wrist until he broke away and floated off into space. In those, Keith lets go and falls after him as if to say, “If I cannot save the most important person in my life, then what is my life to me?”

In reality, they lived, and neither one had spoken of it again.

“Shiro?”

It was Lance.

He hummed.

“What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“With Keith.” He paused, “Between you and Keith.”

He swallowed hard, waiting for whatever next escaped Lance’s mouth.

“When did you stop seeing him as your student?” The words came out in a deadly quiet. “I know what grief did to him. Voltron, this,” he gestured wildly, gangly limbs akimbo, turning his face to the cosmos. “None of it meant a thing. All he wanted was you. He’d go out every single day looking for you, like a blind man armed only with the hope that something would tell him where you were. Even though you never left us.” 

Shiro thought he heard something stress in Lance’s voice, something that almost cracked and broke.

Two lives had lingered in that interstitial space, the him inside the Black Lion and the him without, both of them equally real, one whose mind was scrambled, the other no more than spectral remains.

In the aftermath of the war, clean-up crews had discovered Honerva’s bases, Shiro had seen first hand his original body, flayed and corrupted almost beyond recognition, each layer unwrapped and peeled back, the multitude of genetic abominations, all stages of testing for her clone army, and he hadn’t been the only one. She’d done the same to Sendak and others as well, perfecting their bodies, purifying their genomes, cleansing them of any lingering ailment. Batteries of tests and medical exams had confirmed that his disease was gone, but he couldn't help but feel a tumult of emotions at his own expense. The horror of seeing himself like that, copies of himself treated in equal fashion to create the perfect one he wore now that was more than a second skin. He shuddered.

“Shiro?” Lance laid a hand upon his shoulder.

He thought he might be sick and told himself to hold it together. One person. He was one person. “Keith. He told me he loved me,” Shiro whispered suddenly hoarse from the effort. His knees buckled beneath him and he hit the hard-packed earth beneath his feet as he folded, shuddering. Wrapping one arm around himself, he grasped at his shirt with his left hand, the right prosthetic gripped tightly around his left bicep.

Lance knelt, sliding his arm across Shiro’s shoulders, warm at least. “And what did you do?”

“I-” He couldn’t say it.

“The last time I saw Keith was at your wedding. He showed up for the ceremony, and then when it was all over, he left. Did you even talk to him? What did you do to him, Shiro?”

“The Atlas-”

“Shiro.” This time Lance’s tone was colder. “What did you _say_?”

“Nothing! Okay?” he snapped, volume escalating with irrational anger and he couldn’t put on the brakes. “I told him nothing! I assumed command of the Atlas, and we never spoke of it again. He told me everything he needed to say. He called me his brother and told me he loved me, I-"

_Brother._

He heard his own words. By the look of it, Lance had too, mouth open before the words came out.

“Of course you didn’t talk to him, I don’t know why I even asked.”

Lance’s disparaging sigh smacked of a facepalm. Shiro knew that if he had been anyone else, Lance would have called him stupid.

_Brother._

He knew that. He practically heard it as his friend pulled away and Pidge approached.

He forced himself to his feet.

“Shiro?” she asked.

Lance faked a cough and left to join Keith and Hunk.

“I’m fine, Pidge.”

He knew she didn't believe him, but what else could he say. What else could he do? He had created this mess, and there was no backing out of it. He had to face it head-on, but he didn’t know where to begin.

Shiro wanted nothing more than to stay here and let them go off without him, but to do so would have been the most cowardly thing he’d ever done, and he had already made a promise. Following Lance into the tiny craft, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light from the glare of the two suns. The only seat left for him was the one beside Keith, whose cloak spilled into the second seat. Keith didn’t bother to move it, catching Shiro’s watchful eyes in the glass, hood up and face toward the cosmos. He rested his chin on the heel of his palm, elbow propped against the window sill. Shiro finally had a moment to just look. The Blade of Marmora uniform looked good on him, and Shiro wondered if he hadn't grown some more in his time away. He seemed broader, yet still lean, and his face maintained its familiar sharpness, but that just might have been Shiro's imagination. A fat, messy plait of black hair fell just over his shoulder.

He gingerly squeezed himself in, thigh brushing against Keith’s. Rock hard and tense as ever. Shiro sat back in the seat, even more careful to avoid the shoulder that protruded from the confines of the too-small seat. Keith wrenched the cloak out from under him with a grunt and resumed position as Shiro pulled the harness over his head and clicked the buckle in place.

“Sorry,” Shiro mumbled.

“For what?” Keith spat.

Shiro said nothing for the rest of the trip. Forget Atlas, what he would have given to be back in the cockpit of the Black Lion. Instead, here they were like regents dethroned, riding a dilapidated shuttle transport to the only vessel he had managed to procure; a mercenary cutter he had only acquired with Coran’s bartering assistance from a crafty Unilu on the underground market. Ships, at least, being hard to hide, were also hard to sell. It all worked out in his favor.

Pidge powered up the spacecraft, and Shiro shut the door, locking it in place.

“We can’t go yet,” Keith said as if reminding Pidge about something she’d forgotten.

“Oh right!”

Not a moment later, the cosmic wolf appeared in a miasma of stardust, nearly as big as a horse and occupying the remaining space between Shiro and Keith’s seats and the pilot.

“Now we can leave,” Keith said, reaching down to scratch the wolf’s ears as the ship ascended into the sky.

### II.

From the loading bay, Coran watched the transport shuttle return home to the old cutter.

They orbited one of the Altean moons, one that Pidge claimed reminded her of Earth’s with its desolate landscape pockmarked with craters, save that the composition of the lunar dust in the blue-white light of the planet’s star caused it to shine a pale coral in the sky. She and Hunk had christened this ship the Arcus for the Greek messenger goddess of the rainbow, although Coran had to admit, he still wasn’t sure what that meant. He understood the theory behind rain falling in metaphorical sheets, but in all his time spent at the Galactic Coalition, while he had seen rain storms a-plenty, he had not seen anything he could liken to a bow made out of rain.

It didn’t matter.

He gazed out the window at New Altea, realizing in that moment he was quite possibly the only Altean left alive who had ever even set foot upon the original. "Thank you, Allura," he thought to himself, one white-gloved hand against the inside of the ship’s hull.

Pidge had somehow configured Olkari cloaking technology to work with the out-moded systems on the ship. They were hidden in plain sight and as long as they maintained radio silence, only an extremely savvy technologist actually looking might be able to find them.

Or a Voltron Lion, perhaps, but those were long gone.

Coran staffed the ship with the help of Romelle, easily lured from the embassy kitchens once Hunk had taken leave, and the two of them tried their best to make it feel like home, despite the age and initial condition of the craft. The cutter had required some TLC and by extension many small repairs to get her flying smoothly. Improvements to the engine systems had necessitated enlargement of the engineering bay, which, due to its location, had entailed the loss of half the crew quarters. Coran had outfitted the remaining rooms with bunks, deciding that he would sleep on a cot elsewhere, which was probably the best arrangement. Preparation for departure had taken the entirety of the week, stocking up enough food and supplies to last several months of travel if necessary and energy stores to survive in the void of space without solar radiation to power the ship.

Romelle joined him and they watched the former paladins as they disembarked one by one. The expectation swelling in his chest. He had missed them, and the sense of protectiveness he felt toward each of them reared itself even as he doubted the joy in their reunion. Shiro shuffled out after Pidge and Hunk like a dejected puppy followed by a listless Lance, and finally Keith, irascible as ever, arms crossed defiantly over his chest.

_What happened?_

Coran clasped Shiro’s hand, pulling him close. 

“It’s good to see you.” Such a Shiro phrase to say. He knew all the appropriate words, when and how to use them, and yet it didn't take the shrewd observance of a jack-of-all-trades to note the too-tight clothes or the awkward hunch when he walked in an attempt to hide his affected plushness or the hollowness in his eyes.

“We’ll get you back in shape in no time!” Coran replied, patting Shiro’s belly and ignoring the subsequent cringe as he clasped his hands behind his back as he made his way down the line.

Lance threw himself at Coran, struggling bravely to maintain his composure, though he still left a wet patch on the soft pauldron of the old blue uniform.

“You’re not old enough to get the slipperies yet, young man.” He patted Lance’s back, feeling every strangled muscle spasm and held him tighter. “It’s not your fault,” he whispered.

And it wasn’t, but how does one convince a mere boy that all matters of life and death are infinitely more complicated than the acts alone?

Keith hesitated when he approached, as if he didn’t know what to do or how exactly to react, eyes wide, arms at his sides. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. Coran clapped him on the shoulder with a slight nod and a smile shattered his stoic demeanor when the cosmic wolf licked Coran’s hand.

“Why hello, Kosmo! It’s good to see you too!” Coran hugged the canine, standing on hind legs, paws over his shoulders, despite having reached the relative size of a yaelmore. The wolf was, in fact, the only one who looked _happy_ to be there.

The tour took something less than a varga by Coran’s estimation, ending by shuffling them into the cramped gangway to their quarters. He had prepared for what he assumed would be the most natural sleeping arrangement: Pidge with Romelle, Hunk with Lance, and Keith with Shiro.

Keith froze, and Shiro looked away. Hunk tentatively raised a hand, but the first words came instead from Lance.

“I’ll stay with Keith. Shiro, you go with Hunk.”

Coran realized that somewhere in the denouement, he must have missed something very important.

Despite the hard-set with which Keith glowered, Coran knew relief when he saw it and offered his hand for Lance’s pack and put their things inside.

Now that he thought about it, he shouldn't have been surprised. The former paladins had seemed to want little to do with him. The last time he had seen Keith had been at Shiro's wedding, claiming illness and leaving immediately after the ceremony, not even staying for the cake. Lance avoided him like the plague, Shiro and Hunk were always too busy, and Pidge had fallen into the particularly bad habit of only contacting people when she needed something.

Needless to say, they all could use some improvement, though none perhaps as much as himself.

After all the promises he had made to Alfor, to himself, and the memory of Melenor, he had been unable to save Allura in the end. As a guardian, a surrogate for her lost parents, he knew he had to let her grow up. Allura couldn’t have stayed a child forever, and in growing up, armed with love and knowledge, she had to be allowed to make her own choices.

And he knew in his heart that sometimes the most impossible task was saving someone from themself.

### III.

Lance entered the room after Keith and Kosmo, sliding the door shut behind him with the sole of his shoe, pushing it all the way in until he heard the latch click. Crossing his arms, he leaned against it, effectively blocking the only way out.

For Keith, not the wolf.

Not that he had anything on Keith, perhaps a little taller and broader, still lean, but definitely solid whereas Lance had never quite overgrown his wiry physique.

“All right, tell me what you want,” Keith huffed, turning on heel and eyeing him suspiciously.

Some things never change.

“Glad to see you too. I’m doing _great_ thanks for asking! How are you?" He caught himself talking with his hands and immediately let them fall flat against his sides. “Look, there’s no sense in beating around the juniberry patch. You have a problem.”

“I don't have to listen to this,” Keith said, heading toward him.

He didn't move. Bigger, buffer, Keith fancypants didn't scare Lance “The Tailor” McClain, he was still just an obstinate little boy in the guise of a Marmora agent.

Keith's hand shot out, palm slamming flat into the door beside Lance's face. “Let me out.”

“No,” Lance’s lip curled, irritated. “You're not the best communicator. I know that, and I know you know that. Anyone else?” he shrugged, “Who knows. What I also know, however, is that when things get too far out of your control, you have a bad habit of running, whether it’s toward something or away, you run, and you don’t always think about where you’re going until you get there.”

“Are you done?”

“I guess what I mean is maybe you should slow down.”

“I’m impulsive,” Keith turned around, his back toward Lance, staring at the wall. “Hot blooded, a dropout, a terrible leader. I know that.”

“Shiro said you told him you loved him.”

Keith turned back around so fast his braid whipped around and hit him in the eye. He scrunched up his nose at the sting, rubbing at it with the back of his hand.

Lance snorted with amusement and somehow managed to cover the ghastly sound with a cough, clearing his throat. “See? That’s what I mean!” Lance said.

Keith looked at him blankly, eyes wide and then, after a moment, he blinked. The gears clicked into place, and he started to laugh. He threw himself backward onto the lower bunk and kicked off his boots, pulling his feet up onto the bed.

The wolf curled up on the floor at the foot of the bed, making himself as small as he could, which wasn’t very small.

“Whatever happened to boots-in-the-bed Kogane?” 

Lance felt his face flush at that. He knew it was a thing Keith did, but he couldn’t say how he knew. Perhaps it was the lion bond. He glanced at Keith who seemed completely unphased. 

“He got tired of gravel between his sheets.”

“Just gravel?”

“Yeah. Nothing like gravel to keep you company at night.”

Lance sat down beside him and pulled off his shoes. “Scoot.”

Keith rolled his eyes and moved over just enough so Lance wouldn’t fall off.

“So, you really said that?”

“To Shiro? Yeah.”

“I knew it!” He pumped the air and lay back, head on the pillow.

Lance swung one leg off the side of the bed, and for a long time they stared up at the spring and mattress above them on the upper bunk. Glancing over, he realized Keith didn't even know how to react. Maybe he had changed, or perhaps he'd actually listened. The evidence was clear; Keith knew how to protect himself both physically and emotionally. He made himself unavailable, hence the running. It would get old though. It always did.

He’d felt the same, though his chase was different—antagonize the cute boys and creep on all the girls, though at the time he’d thought that was how it was supposed to go. Bravado and self-confidence went hand-in-hand with charisma, at least that was how it looked in the movies. It had taken him far too long to figure out that nothing in life happened quite the way it did in fiction. The universe only needed one Han Solo after all.

“How do you do it?” Keith finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Keep yourself together when your heart is so brittle if it so much as beats, it'll shatter like glass." Keith didn't move but side-eyed him, waiting for a reply. 

“You don’t,” Lance said simply, lacing his fingers together and resting his folded hands on his chest. Keith had experienced loss before, every kid at the Garrison except for Griffin, the dumbest of dumbasses in their freshman class, knew that Keith was an orphan.

Rag on a person all you want about things they can help or change, but never for the things they can’t.

And while Lance, in principle, had nothing against Krolia, no one could ever give Keith back the time he'd lost not having a parent.

It made him think about the things he could have done and should have done, about the things he was doing now. He wanted to tell Keith that he felt Allura everywhere. Her essence permeated the matrix of this world they now inhabited, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn't escape. He couldn't run away.

Instead, he kept his mouth shut and waited.

Keith hadn’t said anything, but he’d rolled over onto his side. Lance stared at him.

“You haven’t eaten yet today, have you?”

The only reply was a grunt.

If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought Keith was crying.

“I brought some snacks,” he said, sliding off the bed and grabbing his pack beside the door.

“Thanks, Lance. You're a better friend than I deserve.”

“Oh shut up, and while you’re sulking, think long and hard about that depression braid. I mean, it smacked you in the face.” 

### IV

“Who’s going to pilot this thing?” Keith asked, biting into the contraband apple Lance had only minutes earlier produced from his pack.

Hunk's jaw dropped as he stared incredulously at the fruit, perfect and jewel-like, red to yellow-green, in Keith’s hand.

“Where did you get that?” Pidge exclaimed, eyeing the apple suspiciously while Keith chewed.

“We didn’t bring any apples,” Romelle frowned. 

Keith only stared at them. The meat crunched, slightly sweet and so juicy the liquid dripped from his hand onto the floor.

A blight in the early 22nd century had devastated the North American orchards, then war and climate change had taken their toll on the environments where the trees grew. Eating an apple like this in front of everyone suddenly felt like rubbing a “have” in the faces of the “have-nots,” and he actually felt _bad_.

He, Keith, who had been nothing short of poor nearly his entire life. Poor, like eating Spam and canned tuna for his one daily meal or not bathing poor because water was too precious to waste on personal hygiene. 

Joining the Galaxy Garrison hadn’t just meant an education and career path, but a way out of a particular brand of poverty that hadn’t quite ever gone away, not even when he’d lived in the group home after the death of his father.

Once, in his first year of training, he had been given a taste of a real apple, grown from a seed in the green-house on base. The arboriculture team, after years of lengthy petitions, had procured a selection of variant seeds from the old global vault in Svalbard. Those seeds, lovingly nurtured into young trees, had borne fruit, and in celebration of their achievement, the cadets had each been given a small piece.

Keith recalled the mealy sawdust flavor he’d resolved to swallow because any food was still food. This tasted nothing like that.

“Want a bite?” He extended his arm to Hunk, who quickly reached for it but suddenly stopped short. 

“You sure?”

“Of course!”

Lance rolled his eyes while Hunk took a penknife from his pocket and carved off several small pieces, passing them around.

“No, really,” Pidge said, grinding her teeth together and only half-covering her mouth as she ate, “Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift, and no, because I know you’re going to ask, I did not ask where it came from.” But a good guess would have been a farm in Cuba.

“Was it Acxa?” she pressed, one brow suspiciously raised.

Lance snickered. “Is she still after you, Keith?”

“Now Lance-,” Coran interrupted. 

Lance cut him off. “In an organization with a lot of really hot Galra to choose from, who in their right mind would pick Keith?”

Keith glared at him.

_Thank you, Lance._

He shook his head, taking the remainder of his apple back and bit into the core. Someone had told him once that people didn’t eat the core, but he couldn’t imagine wasting it. He chewed and swallowed. “It wasn’t a lady.”

Shiro hadn’t yet said a word, though Keith couldn’t help but notice he’d suddenly stiffened and paled.

_Jealous?_

Keith hadn’t expected that and the thought made him feel queasy as he reminded himself that it wasn’t his fault, a hard lesson to learn when everything had taught him otherwise. He reminded himself that he was enough.

Still, being in the same room proved just as difficult as the flight there. Keith couldn't help but watch Shiro's reflection in the window glass as he sat there with his hood pulled up. No one could know how fractured he felt, all the pieces of his soul scattered across the universe like the stars that dotted the firmament into eternity, forever apart unless, _unless_ they somehow came back together. He imagined it would create an explosion of such fury, the light from it would touch even the farthest galaxies.

“I think you should fly her,” Shiro said, changing the subject.

Hunk stood up from where he’d stationed himself and gestured to the chair.

The pilot’s chair.

“I warmed the seat for you,” Hunk added.

“Does everyone know where we’re going?” Keith trained his eyes on Pidge.

She swiveled around in her seat and tapped at the console's panel in front of her, pulling up a map. Fingers flew across the panel and a three-dimensional model of their journey projected up from a pedestal in the center of the bridge in front of the captain's chair, glitching in and out until Hunk kicked it swiftly with the toe of his boot.

“The anomaly is somewhere in this sector.” She zoomed in on the amorphous miasma of what Keith recognized as the Quantum Abyss arching up and around like a giant shell of unmapped space. “As far as I can tell, it’s never been officially mapped, so we only have models of where the rift should be.”

Romelle tentatively raised her hand, eyes darting around at each of her companions before settling back on the map. She licked her lips. “So this anomaly, Can you tell how far beyond the abyss it is? The colony I’m from isn’t on the map, but it is also on the other side of the Abyss.” She glanced over at Keith then turned her attention back to the map. “Could that have anything to do with the rift? It seems unlikely, but if my small planet was artificial… I don't know." A red flush bloomed in her cheeks, and she stopped talking as if suddenly embarrassed.

“That’s a valid thought though,” Pidge replied, “And I don’t have an answer.”

She zoomed out again, rotating the map and revealing a longer path through the unclear territory.

“For the most part, everything is as it should be, however, the old maps aren’t as exact as I remember them. In theory, we are here.” A soft blue light blinked slowly to indicate their current location, and a line of light displaying their projected journey darted through the map, plotting their planned course.

“Correct, Number 4.” Coran patted the shoulder of her chair with a fond smile at the old moniker as if recalling for all of them a better, easier time. “It is my belief that rebuilding the universe is not an event that took place solely within a single timeline, or, I suppose, individual timelines. Some of them seem to have melded together, though we have knowing if this is in fact the case," Coran said. "We remember where we are from—let’s call it _our_ timeline—and most of it remains intact. Then again, we have Altea and Daibazaal, both of which were destroyed ages ago, yet Olkarion and other planets destroyed either directly or indirectly because of Honerva’s bid for power remain forever gone.” He paused in thought, mechanically twisting one end of his mustache before continuing. “The Galactic Coalition has undertaken the task of a physical remapping of the universe, but it will be some time before that project is completed, so this will just have to do for now. Slav is performing maintenance on several of the Altean teludavs planetside. I’ve arranged use of one through him which will take us as far as the Quantum Abyss, but without further reference, from that point on we have to fly direct.”

Hunk nodded. “Space is too unstable in there anyway.”

“No kidding,” Keith said. “Not to mention, you can’t actually navigate the abyss. Not by conventional methods in any case. There’s too much radiation, re-organization of space, collapsing novae, birthing stars, no consistent magnetic fields...” He trailed off.

“Exactly,” Romelle agreed.

“So, we’ll get through the abyss and then we have to search for it, right?” Keith turned to Pidge.

She nodded. “I thought maybe we could head for Romelle's colony and search from there. I brought the necessary equipment, but we didn't have the resources to completely rebuild the mapping and guidance systems on this ship.”

“We had a small observatory. It is probably still there,” Romelle added.

“We're trusting you, Pidge. This is your mission, and we're here for you,” Shiro said.

Lance raised his brows and stared at Shiro, but no one rebuked his words.

Keith turned his attention back to the helm. “How much time do I have to learn how to fly this old girl?”

Pidge spun her seat back around and checked something on her panel. “About half an hour, er, varga.”

“Okay.”

_Thanks, Pidge._

More time would have been nice, but he would make the most what he was given. “Lance, stay up here with me, please. Pidge, if we’re going to have to make a tight window, we need all systems checked, up, and running.” 

Keith heard a shuffling behind him and plied at the quintessence for confirmation, though he already knew who it was, struck by the notion that he hadn’t forgotten the way his companions moved and breathed. “Hunk?”

“I’ll be in the engine room,” Hunk replied, continuing to make his way toward the door.

“Thank you.” Keith took his chair front and center. The windshield wrapped around the small bridge, revealing the rocky surface of the moonscape and the pastel sheen of Altea in the distance. “Coran, can I get you on navigation? Romelle, just hang tight for now, but we’ll all be relying on your expertise when we get out there.”

“I’ll do my best.” 

“And me?” asked Shiro, wryly.

“What about you?” Keith snapped, immediately regretting his tone. He hadn’t meant to be cruel, though as far as he was concerned, Shiro could do anything as long as it happened out of the way. He didn't bother waiting for a reaction but could see Shiro's vague form in the reflection from the windshield slump into the captain’s chair.

Keith re-focused his attention on the control panel, trying to get a sense of the basics. It reminded him of something, so familiar, yet far away, that he had not seen in a very long time.

Lance took the seat beside him, as the rest of the crew focused on their assigned tasks. “I know this!” Wide-eyed, he turned to Keith in excitement.

They had run through this simulation as Garrison students many times, these old ships having been converted into simulators for the freshman classes. Keith knew the start-up by heart, though someone had helpfully numbered the controls in faded marker on the panel, just in case.

“Yep,” was all Keith could muster, but extended his fist for a friendly bump. 

Pidge patched into engineering. 

“Systems go,” Hunk’s voice cackled through the aging speaker.

“Roger that,” Keith answered. “Starting engine sequence in 5–4–3–2–”

“Dynotherms connected,” Hunk replied and the engine pulsed to life.

Without looking, Keith hit a series of buttons with his left hand, gripping the steering with his right and slowing pulling back. “Infracells up. Megathrusters?”

“Are a go, chief.” Lance punched the sequence in from his chair, and the craft came to life.

“What’s the radiation shielding look like, Pidge?” Keith asked, hoping they’d been upgraded from what he remembered from training. The warp jump through the teludav alone would expose them to high levels of radiation and then there was the Quantum Abyss. When they’d piloted the Lions, it hadn't occurred to him, but now, without protective suits or shielding, even the hardiest Taujeerian could only survive so long to such exposure. Still in his Blade suit, he’d be fine, but a quick glance around the bridge told him he’d be the only one.

“Good. I was able to use the same Olkari interface as the invisibility cloaking - they're both shielding in any case.” A red light blinked on Pidge's console, signaling a hail. Donning her headset, she answered the call, nodding and repeating the message softly to herself. When the call ended, she looked up. “Launchpad 17. Slav says it's around the opposite side of the planet from where we are now, and he wanted to know if anyone is wearing red underwear?”

Someone, possibly Shiro— _definitely Shiro—_ grunted assent.

Pidge forced a grimace and shrugged, brows raised; they all knew Slav. “He said it is imperative that at least someone on this ship wear red underwear and to make sure we take the shortest route to the pad.”

“Already have the coordinates in,” Coran said.

“Thanks.” Keith pulled up the new map and eased the craft out of the moon’s orbit and with shield up, began the descent planetside.

### V.

Shiro brooded in silence, particularly gloomy in Romelle's estimation, and since there was no other place to sit, she leaned against the balustrade separating his position from the lower portion of the bridge and crossed her ankles.

“What’s up with you?" She nudged, knowing Shiro just well enough to understand his modus operandi. Everyone had always looked up to him and admitting emotional susceptibility equated to weakness in his reptile brain. While his mammalian intellect could aptly apply logic and reason, weakness meant failure, and failure was not an option. Golden Boy™ Shiro, Hero with a capital H, captain of the Atlas, five-stripe Admiral Takashi Shirogane slouched defeated in his seat, chin resting in the palm of his prosthetic that, strangely, did not support his body, so he slumped to the side in his chair, half contorted as he watched the bridge with a particularly pained expression.

“I’ve got stool softeners in the med kit if that’ll help?” she tried again.

“Huh?” He sat up suddenly, looking around until he saw her.

He didn’t get the joke.

“You.” She nudged the chair with the toe of her boot. “Something’s on your mind. I can probably guess what, but I’d rather you told me.”

“Just thinking about the mission.”

“You’re a terrible liar. Keith’s worse,” she glanced over at the pilot, knowing he’d probably heard, “but that’s not saying much.”

Shiro’s gaze never left the back of the pilot's seat, the top of Keith's head barely visible. He dropped his voice to a whisper. "I'm going through a d-" he began, but a change came over his features, and he abruptly changed course. "Keith's upset with me and I don't know what to do about it.” 

_Depression? Divorce?_ She supposed he was not ready to share, so she let that question go.

“Why?” she asked instead.

“Why is Keith upset? That’s anybody’s guess.” Shiro slid down farther in the chair, only his feet, planted firmly on the stainless diamond plate floor, prevented him from slipping entirely off the seat. 

Romelle had spent months traveling the Quantum Abyss with Keith, and it had quickly become clear—to her at least—that he cared more for Shiro than for his own well-being. Dangerously so. Keith bore the mark of that affection on his face, and Shiro was only alive because of him.

Yet she’d never heard Shiro bring it up.

“Probably because,” he went on with a rotating flip of his left hand, and she realized then he’d had a long time to think on it, “I lied. I told him I’d never give up on him and then…” he paused with a deep sigh. “And then I did.”

She stared at him. Hard.

“It's like when you know nothing in the entire universe can make that up, and even the most heartfelt apology sounds insincere.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she deadpanned, still scrutinizing his face. “You’re actually telling me that you were low key regretting Keith while you were wooing that hapless youth, Carl?”

“Curtis,” Shiro corrected. “And don’t make it sound like I stole the bun right out of the oven.”

“You kind of did.”

From across the bridge, Keith spoke up, “Isn’t he’s Pidge’s age?”

“I’m an adult!” Pidge insisted.

“Huh?” Lance piped up, having not been paying attention.

Keith shook his head and turned his attention back to flying.

“You forgot he can hear you,” Romelle jibed.

Shiro groaned. “Seven years is nothing.”

“It can be.” Romelle shrugged and went on, "People can grow and change a lot in seven years. Even us Alteans who live for centuries by your reckoning."

Shiro dropped his voice to a low whisper, his eyes searching Romelle’s. “Have you ever done something because you thought it would make you happy? Because it seemed like the best option you’d get the third time around and you didn’t want to waste any more chances because you’d already fucked up enough as is?”

Cruelty did not figure into the list of things Romelle wished to accomplish, but as someone not particularly close to Shiro, she saw it as her place to address the issue head-on. Someone had to call him out, even if it hurt.

“I haven't walked in your shoes, the only ones I have are mine, but from where I stand, I see a man much younger than myself with so much life left to live beating himself up over things he never even tried to change. You've got to try. Or you'll regret not doing so later.”

“It takes two, you know.”

Still collected and maintaining his dignity like the practiced ambassador he'd played at since the Atlas had returned to Earth, Shiro picked himself up and tugged out the wrinkles in his ill-fitting jacket. Calmly and quietly he strode off the bridge.

Romelle shook her head as she watched him go. 

### VI.

It wasn’t so much the danger of the abyss that gave Keith pause, he had every confidence in his ability to fly through it, with or without a navigator, he just didn’t want to. He’d been stuck in here for two very long years, and with his mother of all people. In the beginning, being trapped in a place where the only other person happened to be someone who had left him—regardless of intent—had proved trying. When she’d looked to him for understanding, the fact remained, she had chosen to go, and whether or not that had been the right choice, she had owned it. 

At least for that, he could respect her. Unapologetic. Take it or leave it.

He didn’t hate her, and time had rendered him somewhat numb to his own animosity. He’d tried on the mantle of affection, calling her “mom,” which came out of his mouth like a foreign tongue, like the words, “I love you.” Words he couldn't bring himself to speak again.

Because they were true.

Perhaps in another reality, he’d had a happier childhood and a very different life. Moving on from all of it, from his deep-seated feelings of abandonment and the fortress he’d built to protect himself to the pain of losing his best friend, physically and mentally, happened slowly. He still thought of himself as something of a work in progress.

He did not want to abandon that effort, but this excursion felt like that to him, especially with his fellow ex-paladins. How was he supposed to move on, if he kept revisiting the past? At least he had a ship this time and the coordinates for a destination. All he had to do was get them through. He’d even joked with Pidge he could do it in all of 12 parsecs.

So far, however, the trip had not been uneventful. They weren't even halfway in, and already Keith had sweated through his Marmora uniform, strands of hair plastered to his forehead and neck. He wiped at it with an equally soggy gloved hand. He could smell himself, and tried to ignore it.

A beam of light struck with such force that it rocked their small ship. Blinded by the intensity, Keith struggled to right it. “Hang on! We’re fine,” he yelled, even as he heard the metal hull creak and groan around them.

Pidge whimpered, sniffling, her breaths short as she tried to control the desperate sobs that wanted to escape. “I saw her. I saw Allura, infinite and alone, and there was nothing we could do!”

He refused to look at her; he needed to keep his sights on the coordinates and get them through safely. The cosmic wolf belly-crawled into the space between the pilot and copilot seats, squeezing himself down into a crouch, resting his head on his paws.

“Is this what it was like? Before?” Pidge cried through her tears.

“Yes,” Keith choked out, still at odds with the ship. “It’s-

“So you saw Allura!” Lance exclaimed, unbuckling his harness and jumping up from his seat. “You knew she was going to sacrifice-”

“No!” He whipped his head angrily around, gobsmacked. “That’s not how this works!”

“Keith! Watch-” Coran yelled just as an asteroid nearly collided with the shell of the spacecraft.

Keith tipped the craft up in time to avoid it, but the sudden motion sent them into a drift. They spiraled out of it into another column of brilliant white light.

The wolf whined. Pidge screamed. Lance grit his teeth, and through the radio, Hunk patched in a queasy, “What just happened?”

_Curtis and Shiro sat together at the foot of the bed. Shiro lay his hand over his husband’s, but Curtis pulled away, lacing his long, spidery fingers together in his lap._

_“I can’t do this anymore, Takashi.” His voice shook and a shudder ran across his shoulders._

_“I-” Shiro sighed, an emotional black hole staring blankly at the person beside him. “Adam said the same thing. I guess I really am that bad at relationships.” He swallowed down a forced laugh, unable to move._

_Fuck this noise._

Lance nearly jumped out of his seat, “Can’t you just avoid the beams? Stop flying like-”

“Like what?” Keith growled in a flash of anger, rolling the ship a full 360 degrees to avoid another barrage of asteroids hurtling toward them. Lance tumbled out of his seat, smacking into the ceiling before landing on top of Pidge, limbs akimbo. Coran shouted the numbers from the navigation screen, but they made no sense in here. 

_Why aren’t you buckled in?_

“Get off of me!” Pidge shrieked as Lance clung desperately to her seat, his feet rising behind him as the simulated gravity stopped working.

“Huh. I guess the simulated gravity’s still working.” Keith glanced at Lance with a self-satisfied smirk, bringing the back on course. “I can’t avoid the light. Nothing travels faster than light. Wormholes bend space and time, but Einstein’s still in the driver’s seat.” He wiped the sweat from his brow onto his sleeve never taking his hands off the steering. “Get yourself harnessed in.”

The Abyss gave them a moment to breathe.

“It’s not just one future set in stone that you might see in here,” Keith said. “There are infinite possibilities based on the present.”

Pidge blew her nose, “That makes sense.”

“What futures did you see?” Coran asked.

“Things I don’t yet understand, things I did understand, and things that have already happened.” He sounded like a soothsayer.

“Like what?” Lance grilled, crawling over the wolf back to his chair and pulling the harness over his head, snapping the buckle in place.

He’d have to offer something, but only one thing came to mind. “When I was here before, I saw Haggar’s cloning facility.”

Silence filled the ship, the only sound the soft whirring song of the propulsion unit that kept the ship in flight.

“So,” Shiro spoke up from the back of the room.

With a clear course ahead, Keith allowed himself to look behind him. Rumpled, Shiro braced himself in the doorway, nursing a swelling bruise on his forehead and chewing his lip. “You already knew you were going to save me?”

“No, Shiro. In every reality I saw here-”

A low moan interrupted him, and he looked down at the wolf, luminous golden eyes fixed on him before they turned to Shiro with a huff.

“We died.”

“We died?” Shiro repeated as if he hadn’t heard correctly and wanted to make sure he understood.

Keith nodded.

  
_11.9, Pidge. 11.9_


	3. Grief and Toil

### I.

How much time had been lost or gained by crossing the abyss? Hunk shuddered involuntarily at the lingering thought. He couldn't quite shake the nagging fear that one false move might have cost them an entire lifetime, and several times the abrupt jarrings of the spacecraft had felt very much like false moves. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Keith, because he did, he was just overthinking things. As usual.

He exhaled and opened his eyes, still clenching the shoulder straps of his harness with white-knuckled fists and managing to keep himself together through the landing on the small unnamed planet where Romelle’s colony had remained hidden for millennia.

With no windows in engineering, his first sight of green earth was the moment he disembarked, two feet in a field of blue-green grass. Soft, slightly spongy. He knelt in it, placed his hands flat upon it, and pressed his forehead into it, savoring the slightly sweet, fresh chlorophyll scent before emptying the contents of his stomach all over it. Thawed lasagna and a pouch of wasabi peas.

He collapsed on his back and waited for the nausea to pass. 

Eventually, he found the energy to move again and followed his companions, Romelle leading the way.

An abandoned ruin, the colony lay as empty as it had since its inhabitants had followed a lesser god into the collapsing white hole that hid the fabled Oriande. Doors stood ajar, unlocked in this crimeless land. In the temperate climate, windows had been left open to the elements. Flora crept in over the sills and around the moldings, working its way into the homes that would eventually be returned to the natural world, obliterating all evidence of people ever having lived here.

Hunk found himself grateful for the reprieve, yet it would only last as long as it took to pinpoint the source of the entity’s signal. Pidge only needed a place to set up her equipment, and Romelle had promised her an observatory, where the colony had watched the heavens and monitored the skies for Lotor's ship.

He wanted a nap, though he couldn’t blame Coran for shuttling them all off the ship. A break would do them good. Even the unflappable Admiral Shirogane looked white as a sheet. To call the experience harrowing was an understatement.

This place, the Altean colony, represented a more complex society than he had expected. The “village” contained individual houses and apartment complexes for the inhabitants. From what he could see on the outside: landscaping, paved roads, manufactured goods, commerce, technology integrated into the structures, all of it revealed the evidence of civilization. They had the knowledge and the skill sets, implying a high degree of sophistication and education. Romelle herself had flown a small spacecraft out into the abyss, and while lost, she had competently marooned herself in relative safety. That she had those skills spoke to her descent from a people of curiosity and wonder. They weren't at war, they were instead explorers and creatives, people of courage and imagination. Even if removed from the culture that had born Allura and Coran, she was still very much a part of it.

Meeting different people like this, learning about their homelands and way of life fascinated Hunk. He missed that part of his role at the embassy before his duties in the kitchen had taken him away from it. As much as he thought he’d missed engineering, he hadn’t enjoyed a single moment alone in the bowels of the Arcus.

His mind wandered back to the colonists. How did they get stuff? Lotor must have facilitated the exchange of goods because they were technically in hiding. Did they perhaps trade with the sister colony where Lotor had used the people for- He didn’t really want to think about that.

So he stopped.

“How large is this planet, anyway?” he asked anyone who would listen.

“No bigger than our moon,” Pidge replied.

Of course she would know. Big enough. This was more than just a colony.

“We were quite proud of our travel and communications network,” Romelle added. “Coran called our technology old, but we knew how to use it, upkeep it, and were, albeit slowly, developing it as best we could with no outside assistance.”

“Advanced by recent Earth standards,” Lance said. “I was in awe the moment I set eyes on the Blue Lion, and it never quite went away. There was this overwhelming feeling...” He trailed off, a far-off look in his eyes.

The pain of losing Allura might never go away. In a way, though, that was why they were here. The universe wasn’t fully mended, unless rifts were a natural part of the existence of the cosmos, like festering ulcers, wounds at the edges that became increasingly harder to heal. Allura’s sacrifice had been more of a stop-gap than a cure-all, as if all they’d managed to accomplish, all that sacrifice and misery was to treat the symptoms and not the cause.

Life shouldn’t be such a tragedy. It wasn’t fair.

“The Lions were far more powerful than they ever let on." Keith broke the silence. "I still don't understand how the Blue Lion created a wormhole to get us there."

“It felt like destiny,” Shiro added.

"You're just used to things happening to you." As soon as the words had left his mouth, Hunk realized that in a way, he also spoke for himself. He tended to go along with things because it was easy. He had ended up with Voltron by going along with Lance and Pidge when he should have just stayed home, but hindsight told a different story. If he had stayed, he might have ended up dead or with his parents. Who would have rescued them? Who would have replaced him on the team, struggling to keep the group from falling apart at every turn?

In the vastness of space, where Keith had once asked if any of them were really friends, he had asked himself the same question.

He didn’t like his answer, but he’d lied his way through it wondering if the shattered threads that kept them together could ever be remade stronger. Or that perhaps by believing in a lie, he could force it to become a truth.

Shiro had nothing to say after that.

“The observatory is close by.” Romelle pointed toward a white-washed domed structure with satellite array peeking above the leafy treetops.

“Perfect!” Pidge exclaimed.

### II.

After helping Pidge schlep the equipment up to the observatory, they’d eaten and retreated to one of the smaller apartment buildings for sleep. No one was here, so they figured why not.

It felt like a barracks to Keith, and he appreciated the relative structure, like that of the Garrison or the Blade, only no one here was telling him to brush his teeth or press his uniform. He did the former anyway and in abject defiance of a code that didn’t apply here, he left his dirty clothes in piles on the floor.

He lay awake staring at the ceiling, the wolf curled up at his feet, barely fitting across the foot of the bed. Keith had always been a poor sleeper, and the stress of it was taking its toll. People said he looked tired, worn out.

_They weren’t wrong._

While Keith hadn’t changed much on the outside, his time with the Blade had honed his senses into something other than what they had been. His unique physiology remained something of a mystery. Most half-Galra retained some outward evidence of that race, but his human genes had fought for dominance and won. Interestingly enough, his differences were invisible. While he had always had excellent vision and hearing, he had come to realize that was most likely due to his genetic make-up. He could see just a little farther into the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the light spectrum, heat mixed with color and the burning corona of every star. The Blade taught him how to use that to his advantage, same as his hearing. The sounds of the world lulled him to sleep, and when he suddenly found himself in space, enclosed within the hulking structure of the Altean castle ship, the ever-present creaks and mechanical digestion of the internal mechanisms had often kept him up. 

It had taken weeks for him to acclimate. No wonder everyone thought he was moody.

He finally began to drift off when a soft whimper slipped through the vent. He glanced at the wolf, ears twitching and rotating toward the noise. At first, Keith tried to ignore it, but the more carefully he listened, the more it sounded like stifled crying. He sat up, brushing his hair out of his face and tugging the hair tie off his wrist before gathering it in a high, sloppy ponytail at the back of his head that he pulled through to an even messier bun. He needed a haircut, but he hadn’t made the time for it. Leaning over the side of the bed, he rummaged through his pack for something to wear. He tugged on a pair of athletic pants, slipped his bare feet into his boots and pulled a tank top on over his head. The curve of the neck dipped to the base of his sternum, and the fabric bunched at his hips.

_Well._

It sure wasn’t his.

To be fair, he hadn’t unpacked his civilian clothes since two visits to Earth ago, the most recent one having been Shiro’s wedding. He’d wondered why Shiro had even invited him, like an insult to injury.

_Just rub some salt in that wound while you’re at it._

The time before that, the Lions had left, called home with the implication the universe no longer needed them.

_Yeah, right._

The noise hadn’t stopped. A chill swept through the sterile room.

When he put his hand to the touchpad, the door slid soundlessly open, indiscriminate in its operation. The sound came from a room farther down the dark hall, and it took no rocket scientist to know whose it was.

The responsibility did not fall on him, did it? He was no man’s keeper, but all the other doors down the hall remained tightly shut. What about the quintessence bond? Didn’t they know? It couldn’t have been that his hearing was more acute, or that the ventilation system regulating the air inside the complex only went from his room to Shiro’s. Certainly, it passed over Pidge as well as Lance between them, even if Hunk, Romelle, and Coran, all across the hall weren’t connected.

Keith knocked three times on Shiro’s door with two knuckles. Short, hard raps. The strangled noises ceased abruptly, but no one came to greet him.

He took a deep breath; he could do this. 

“Shiro?” He spoke lowly, face to the corner where the sliding door met the wall. “Are you all right?”

After some rustling and shuffling an answer came. “I’m fine.” 

_No, you’re not._

_I’m not._

“Okay, I’m going back to bed,” he managed, cool as a plume of magma ejecting from the cone of a volcano.

_Smooth. Real smooth._

Keith stepped back, wondering if he’d be able to sleep through the rest of the night anyway when the door cracked open and slid partially back into the pocket. Shiro poked his head out, light from the row of high windows along the outside wall reflecting off his silver hair, the aqua glow from his prosthetic disarmingly bright.

Shiro stared at him, a look of unmasked surprise on his face. With a moment’s hesitation, he stepped aside and gestured for Keith to join him.

The rooms were identical, the sterile monasticism of fanatics, or people who accepted that they were exiles living in technological and civil stagnancy while the universe flourished outside. A single, narrow bed, a modest desk with a lamp, a dresser, a wardrobe, and a small sink with a mirror outside an adjacent private toilet and shower. It made Romelle a heretic of her time when he imagined how hard it must have been for her to even conceive of the lie that her entire world perpetuated, living the indoctrination of such a carefully crafted mythology.

Keith pulled the desk chair out and sat on it backward, resting one elbow on the back of the chair, chin on the heel of his palm.

Exhaling in fits and spurts, Shiro collapsed, head in his hands against the back of the door, sliding down to his knees. Yet even as Shiro scraped his fingers over his scalp, and dragged his palms down his face, he waited for Keith to speak first.

Keith looked him over; from bloodshot eyes to the glisten of tears smeared over his cheeks to his pajamas that didn’t fit quite right. He tried to conjure the words to describe it. Despair held Shiro in a tight-fisted grip. He wanted to ask what was wrong, what _happened_ , but he’d forfeited that right a long time ago. 

“So, uh, how’re things?” Awkward, but vague enough that Shiro could improvise or leave out whatever he wanted.

Shiro’s brows furrowed, cutting an even bigger chasm between them while he decided what to say. “I’m in the middle of a divorce.” 

Keith screwed up his face, eyeing him with suspicion. So that’s what it was. He hadn’t heard, though admittedly he had intentionally blocked out the quintessence, as strange and faint as it was. Besides, the noises he’d heard through the vent sounded more like the suffering throes of a bad dream than the heart—and gut—wrenching sobs of a marriage gone wrong. Then again, what did he know? He’d probably never be married, and he no longer dreamed.

“Oh,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic.

It just fell flat.

Shiro’s eyes grew wide, and then suddenly, he laughed.

It didn’t help. Keith tensed, asking himself why he’d even decided to stay. “I should go.” He shifted his weight to one side, swinging his leg over the seat as he stood.

“Wait,” Shiro pleaded.

Keith could feel his patience waning. He could only do, say, and be so much. “Look, I know I’m not the easiest person to talk to, but can you please just tell me one thing? What did I do?”

“You left,” Shiro said simply, shadows masking his face, but not his eyes. The thin golden light from the Quantum Abyss spattered a band across the sky so much brighter than the Milky Way looked on Earth. It seeped in between the delicate tracery of the bare windows.

“You left first. When you left the Black Lion to room with Pidge. When you accepted command of the Atlas…” he trailed off, recalling how confused and angry he’d been, how difficult it had been just to go through the motions, to function. 

_“Voltron is stronger now more than ever.”_

He’d spoken those words in Shiro’s face, trying to convince himself they really were, that he had the experience and the poise and the command to lead the team. He’d done it because he’d had to and no one else could since Shiro had stepped down. Instead it had come out like a fiercely ugly challenge. The unspoken “without you” passed between them, practically begging for a fight that never came to pass.

They’d avoided each other even more after that.

“I rarely saw you,” Keith said quickly, “and then afterward, after the war. What was I supposed to do? Hang around until you decided you wanted me in your life?" Keith snapped his mouth shut, the wound in his tenderized heart once again red and raw. "I waited and waited.” 

_Because I had to know it wasn’t me. That you didn’t hate me for it. For bringing you back, for trapping you in this second or third or whatever chance._

_Stop._

He continued, “And then you found whatever his name is. Kevin? Kyle? Curtis?”

“Don’t you dare drag him into this!”

“You already did. You did that ages ago.” Keith stared at him, all of the hurt and unspoken anger blazing up again from behind his eyes like an ever-sputtering pilot light suddenly blazing to life. “Why wasn’t it me?” His voice cracked with such despair he snapped his mouth shut, clenching his jaw knowing just how desperate he sounded.

“You called me your brother-”

“I went through Hell to find you,” Keith whispered and stopped, eyes burning, nausea like a lump of lead in the pit of his stomach. 

“You saved me and now it feels like you don’t even-”

“Don’t,” he said, dangerously low, his anguish sounding more like a raspy, distorted growl that a cry of distress melting to relief. Shiro had never hated him for it. 

_I’d do it again, even knowing how it ends._

Shiro swallowed hard, unable to hide the horror stricken in his eyes. “I didn’t know you felt—I didn’t think you’d-”

“Did it mean nothing? Did I mean nothing?” Keith closed his eyes and tried to breathe. Old wells of anger and frustration came burbling up. He wanted to hit something or break something—something that wasn’t already as broken as the two occupants of the room.

Shiro gulped, the strangulated noise he made sounded like drowning. “But you—”

“No wonder your marriage fell apart. Please at least tell me you loved him, that you didn't make him as miserable as you are now, that you didn't pull away and distance yourself, burying your head in your work as you avoided facing anything you didn't want while you let yourself, oh I don’t know,” he threw his hands up, “detach yourself from everything!”

“Isn’t that what you did?” Shiro snapped back, looking up at him with some fight left in his eyes. “Isn’t that what running away to the Blade of Marmora was all about in the first place? You know who you are, and you knew where you belonged.”

Keith clenched his fists hard, his nails gouging into his palms. “Do you really think that’s all there was to it?”

“It wasn’t there, Keith. You never belonged there. You still don’t, but you can’t see that because you’re still running away from yourself.”

“Right. Are you sure you want to do this? I only took on the Black Lion because you weren't there and when you came back? Maybe I thought your need was greater than mine, that she wasn't mine to take or keep. No one needed me, no one missed me when I was gone. What was I supposed to do?”

“That’s not true!” Shiro cried, raising his voice. “I missed you. _I_ needed you!”

“But you didn’t.”

“If that’s how you really feel, then why are you even here, Keith?”

“Because someone had to fly that hunk of junk through the Quantum Abyss. Because if I didn’t, there’s a good chance that all of you—and that includes _you_ , Shiro—could have been killed or worse—stranded out here where no one is going to come find you! Because I've known you longer than the only blood family I have. Because after everything you've done for me, do you really think I'd let you—or any of you—risk yourselves like this?" 

“You feel guilty.” Shiro said it simply as if the news were a revelation that had just struck home, his face composed again and understanding. “We all do.”

Keith stared at him, but he had the right of it, at the core of this journey was an overwhelming sense of guilt. The idea that they all could have done better, been better, not allowed Allura to give herself up for something that conceivably was no better than what they’d had when she was still… _there._

It wasn’t the only reason, though.

“I made a promise, but you’re not the person I used to know. The Shiro I knew stood up for himself and his beliefs and desires. He had dreams and goals. He never backed down or stood aside.” Keith chewed on his lip. He spoke of a person he hadn’t known since before the Kerberos mission, but even through a year of torture, loss of his arm, and escape from his captors, Shiro hadn’t lost those qualities Keith had always admired. It was afterward, with his spirit absorbed into the Black Lion, with nothing left but a dusting of fading quintessence across the pilot’s chair that shimmered brilliantly even in the dimming light of the cockpit. Why had he given up? “What happened inside the Black Lion?”

Momentarily forgetting the lack of support his prosthetic provided, Shiro moved as if he was going to lean back on his elbows, then shifted before he fell on his side and sat up again. “I became one with her. Everything that was me and everything that was her, only I was no longer myself if that makes any sense.”

Shiro went on. “I gave everything I had left to defeat Zarkon, and you know what? It wasn’t enough.”

“Don’t be a martyr. There were five of us. It’s not just you. It’s not supposed to be _you_ carrying the weight of us all, but we didn’t learn that lesson soon enough.”

Laying back on the floor, Shiro glanced at him before fixing his eyes on the marvelous sky outside the window. "Allura tried to teach us that. She was far wiser sometimes than I think any of us gave her credit for. ‘Stronger together.’”

“ _We_ weren’t strong enough. You’re not Atlas, you’re Shiro. The world doesn’t rest upon your shoulders.”

“I—”

He couldn’t take any more of this, had faced enough. “Good night,” Keith said, retreating toward the door. He let himself out and swiftly made his way back to his own room.

### III.

Lance pressed his ear against the wall, still unable to make out the conversation in the room next door. It didn’t surprise him that Keith had gone to Shiro, not really, even after everything that had and had not happened between them. He sounded upset, the decibel level on an exponential hike until the stuttering cries leveled out and then—finally—ceased.

Poor sleep had reared its ugly head as an unfortunate side effect of Lance's post-Voltron experience, and not even a hydrating facial, noise-canceling headset, and sleep mask could completely clear the puffy purple bags under his eyes. The quintessence brought him no comfort and wished he had Keith’s hearing, at least then he’d know what was going on. He spat a curse out under his breath for even entertaining the thought—the what-ifs of his life, wanting to be like other people with their skills and talents just made him depressed. Besides, he knew what he was good at.

_Milkshakes._

_Face it, Lancey-boy, yours has gone off._

And he didn't even mean it in _that_ way. His yard had never exactly been a happening place. Every fiber of his being, every atomic particle, the very cosmic dust from which he was formed had soured. Not that he’d had much confidence in it before. “Fake it ‘til you make it” hadn’t worked. To think, at one point he’d even sought advice from Keith, and he knew no one less qualified to deal out relationship advice.

At the same time, another voice in his head told him he wasn’t being wasn't fair. It was a lighter voice, one with laughter like the soft babble of a brook in spring, that whispered good night in hushed tones if he dared to listen and didn't block it out with white noise or loud music.

_Her voice._

His heart clenched and stole his breath away as he squeezed his eyes so tightly shut his tears formed at the corners that dribbled down his burning cheeks. He gritted his teeth together to keep from making a sound as they splashed onto the floor.

He and Allura had barely had any time together, and what had they even done with it?

_What a waste! You’re such a waste!_

Lance curled his hand into a fist and punched the floor, collapsing against the wall and sliding down against it, forehead to the high-polished metallic surface. Before it had ever happened, he’d imagined their first date, an immature version of himself strutting around, the lady clinging to his arm like a trophy he’d won with dashing charm and debonaire charisma, yet he had never embodied those qualities and people weren’t things to possess. In reality, he’d barely mustered the courage to take her hand. Every word he’d spoken still felt strangely selfish when he replayed them in his mind. “It’s okay,” he thought, giving himself permission to want. That hard-earned lesson drove its point home time and time again.

He should have acted sooner, but hindsight’s perfect vision always turned up after the fact. Funny, that.

If Keith hadn’t been kicked out of the Garrison, _he_ wouldn’t have made it to the fighter pilot program. If Keith hadn’t taken over for Shiro, _he_ never would have flown the Red Lion. If Shiro hadn’t returned and Keith hadn't promptly gone off fraternizing with the Blade, _he_ might not have stayed with Voltron at all. A lot of Keith came wrapped up in those feelings, standing in someone else's shadow, a shadow that didn't even see him half the time. Yet while he wanted someone to blame, he'd also come to realize that Keith had his own set of problems and insecurities that didn’t in any way play into moving aside for Lance. Allura hadn’t seen him as the mediocre seventh wheel who only ever made it on the backs of others. She might have said an opportunity had arisen and Lance had stepped up.

He wanted someone to talk to.

Disinclined to seek Hunk out in the middle of the night, most likely enjoying restful slumber, Lance instead tried to imagine what his friend would say. He hadn’t sought Hunk’s advice in so long, the idea of asking in person looked needy, though he _was_ needy.

_“Don't question it. That's like saying the person you like has terrible taste or something. It looks bad—on you, not her.”_

That sounded almost right. Lance had worn a lot of bad looks lately. Ugly thoughts did that to a person.

Perhaps instead of focusing on what he’d done wrong, he could think about what he’d done right, but that proved increasingly difficult, like reliving a bad end just to revel in the few crumbles of good that an unforgiving creator just so happened to have abandoned.

It hurt. He bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from crying out and collected himself enough to make it back to bed.

_Why are you here again?_

He inhaled and exhaled on a count of four, going through the reason in his head like a mantra.

_Because if there’s a rift in this universe, there's a chance she left something undone, and maybe she did that on purpose. Something for us. For me._

It smelled like hope. He didn’t want to believe it, but then he started listing out all the things he admired about Allura; her kindness, her spirit, her pure intent, her willingness to reflect, the warmth of her smile, her heart.

She must have left something.

His face still burned and he rubbed the sleeve of his nightshirt over his eyes. It didn't stop. The pain seared along his cheekbones, but when he touched the strange blue marks on the ridges of his cheekbones, it only felt cold.

A faint blue aura skirted the lower periphery of his vision. The quintessence told him it wasn’t Shiro.

### IV.

As surprisingly advanced as this place had revealed itself to be, Pidge remained unimpressed. Everything from the city streets to the apartments they slept in felt sterile and prescribed, standard issue, everything sorted and organized to a monotonous cookie-cutter standard. She supposed some people probably liked that. Not her, and certainly not Hunk had appeared in the middle of the night with his blankets and pillow and made a nest for himself on the floor in the middle of her room, clearly creeped out.

Probably by the noise through the air vents. It sounded like…

Ghosts.

It had stopped a short while ago. Still, she couldn’t manage to get to sleep.

With the dawn, which was more of a brightening from the ever-active Quantum Abyss than a sunrise, Hunk left to scrounge food from the ship while Pidge made her way to the observatory where she'd stashed her equipment the night before. She looked at her tablet and checked the up-link to the ship asking it to scan the space around the planet.

Nothing.

Which was good. They hadn’t been tracked, but why would they have been? She’d taken every precaution, which included a security scan for bugs when they’d entered the Arcus. Everyone had passed, so she saw no need to tell them. Besides, who would care?

_Galactic Coalition council officials, ambassadors, just about everybody who knows the full extent of what happened._

Big yikes.

She yawned and opened up the dome shielding to let in the morning light before getting to work.

Hunk and Keith arrived in short order, both looking somewhat better than they had the previous day. It was the first time she’d seen Keith out of uniform since Shiro’s wedding. She didn’t recognize the well-worn flight jacket, but it hung so loosely on him it had probably belonged to someone else. She only needed one guess. Keith had cut his hair, not particularly well, and wet from the shower, it flipped out past his chin and fell across his eyes the way it had the first time they'd met.

_Always rescuing Shiro._

She smelled the bold aroma of coffee and saw mugs in Keith’s hands and a tray of plates packed full of grub in Hunk’s.

“Thank everything that is great and good in this universe! Eggs!” She clapped her hands together, mouth already watering.

“Real eggs! Romelle did good.” Hunk exclaimed excitedly and then turned to Keith, adding, “She took care of the food stores for the trip.”

He nodded in agreement, setting the mugs down on a nearby crate and filching a crispy piece of bacon from one of the plates, crunching it between his teeth. “Bacon’s good too.”

Pidge took a piece with relish. They’d probably worked together; Keith’s cooking tended to look simple but at the same time sloppy while Hunk perfectly plated his meals every time—usually with some sort of edible garnish.

Keith only seemed somewhat tidy because he didn’t have a lot of things. She remembered feeling right at home in his desert shack with its plywood and cinder block furniture, littered with opened tins of partially eaten meats, sticky-notes that hadn’t made their way onto the conspiracy corkboard and the occasional article of stray laundry that didn’t pass the sniff test. Conversely, Hunk bordered on what she categorized as fastidious, a place for everything and everything in its place.

Hunk handed her a fork, and she stabbed at the scrambled eggs, shoveling the first bite into her mouth. Whoever's good sense thought to add cheese to them deserved praise. She savored the meal, having relied on cafeteria food for most of her sustenance over the past several months. The prefabricated meals weren't bad, but they grew boring after a while, always the same flavors, selections, and temperature. Practically perfect in every way.

_Better than food goo, but pretty much bleh._

The computer even “prepared” her meals in the replicator with a simpering smile on the blue screen.

She could have done without.

“So what’s the game plan?” Keith asked, picking at his own plate and grabbing one of the mugs, before plopping himself down in one of the chairs at the console.

“Shouldn’t we wait for everyone else to get up?” Hunk said, covering his mouth with one hand as he spoke through his food.

“Why?” Always quick to his points, Keith glanced sharply from Hunk, leaning against the crate, to Pidge. “There's plenty of breakfast left, and Coran said he'd let the others know whenever they decide to surface.”

“Doesn’t really matter, we can get started,” Pidge shrugged. “So, what do you two know about this planet anyway?”

“It’s rogue,” Keith said.

“Sort of,” Pidge conceded. “It's likely the planet was conceived by a solar system swallowed up by the Abyss. A rogue planet is defined as one that orbits a galactic center directly, and this one doesn't orbit—”

“But it rotates. The gravity and magnetic fields out here are weird. When we were coming in, I pretty much had to rely on instrumentation to tell me where I could and couldn’t go.”

“That’s exactly how I ended up stuck," Romelle said, entering through the door with a steaming beverage in one hand and something that looked like a soggy dead animal in the other, coal black and wet, dribbling liquid across the floor as Romelle joined them. She took a tentative sip and smacked her lips. 

She tried to toss the thing to Keith, but instead it slopped to the floor with a splat. “You left that in the shower.”

He glanced at it.

“What is it?” Pidge’s eyes widened, curiosity piqued. 

“At first, I thought it was one of your Earth rats. Note the length, about, oh, what do you call those weird measurements again? Centimeters? Twenty centimeters long, fatter in the middle and then there’s that piece straggling out at the end, I thought that was part of a tail, but I was wrong. I was so very, very wrong.” 

“Oh my…” Hunk’s jaw dropped, and he went over to poke at it. “Is this your hair?” He eyed Keith suspiciously, wearing an agonized grimace. 

“Wooooow. That’s a lot.” Pidge glanced from Keith to the braid, back to Keith again, fascinated. “I had that much hair once.” 

Romelle cleared her throat. “I just wanted a shower that worked. That’s all!” she huffed in exasperation. “I think the water was turned off on my side of the hall,” she explained. “I should have asked someone else. _That_ was just too much.”

Keith shrugged and popped another piece of bacon into his mouth. “Honestly,” he went back to the previous topic, “with no training, I'm impressed you made it as far as you did.”

Pidge picked up the hair-rat, the entire braid secured at each end and let it swing precariously between her thumb and forefinger, droplets of water dribbling from it as it oscillated like a pendulum. “Better take that and run with it, he doesn’t hand out compliments often.”

Keith pretended not to hear.

“Anyway,” Pidge resumed, letting the hair fall to the floor again, “this planet rotates on a fairly regular basis—at least for us. It’s closer to what we’d term a Martian day than an Earth day. I’m not surprised either, with how similar Alteans and Humans are.” She narrowed her eyes at Romelle. “Are you sure your people didn’t seed our system hundreds of thousands of years ago?”

Romelle laughed. “No idea!”

Pidge wasn’t really joking, but she rolled with it. “The real problem is that due to light bending because of gravitational lensing surrounding the Abyss, we have a very limited window during which we can work.”

“Can’t we just get back on the Arcus and do this from there?” Keith stared at the contents of his mug, brows raised, before taking another sip.

“Honestly? The Arcus doesn’t have enough space for me to set everything up for a full analysis. If Romelle hadn't suggested coming here, I would have had to come up with a different solution.” She reached for one of her crates and began to unpack. “Like stopping inside the Quantum Abyss.”

Keith set the mug down and shook his head, rubbing his temples. “Noooooo!”

Hunk snorted. “Not enough space…”

Pidge tasked Romelle with powering up the generator and all systems related to bringing the telescope back online. Hunk went to work on the radio tower and satellite dishes, making sure they were still in working order. She sent Keith off to gather the remainder of her equipment from the ship with Coran and Lance when they finally showed up.

Shiro, however, remained conspicuously absent. Yet just before lunchtime, Kosmo appeared with one Admiral Takashi Shirogane in tow, red-eyed and pale with tousled hair, still in pajamas.

“Nice of you to join us,” Pidge deadpanned. “You look-”

_Like shit._

“-rough,” she concluded.

Shiro scratched his head and yawned. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t feeling well this morning.”

The wolf licked his hand.

“Hey, Shiro,” Hunk said, smiling in greeting from the doorway and kneeling for the wolf who, upon seeing him, bounded toward him with zeal. “Kosmo!” The wolf nuzzled Hunk’s face and licked his cheek. 

“He’s a good boy,” Keith said, matter-of-fact.

“Is that?” Shiro stared at Keith, squinting. “Is that my jacket?”

“Probably.” Keith shrugged and went back to assembling the radio equipment. He didn’t look up. “It was in my things, but I haven’t worn civvies in a while. I just grabbed my bag. You can have it back if you want.”

“Keep it.”

_Typical._

Pidge noted the improvement though; the conversation remained civil.

At least they were trying. That was really all she could ask.

She went back to work and pretended not to notice when Kosmo found the discarded braid and brought it to Shiro, wagging his tail and dropping the thing at his feet and smiling up at him like a good boy, the best boy. 

Shiro shrieked. 

_Earth rat indeed._

### V.

The cosmic wolf remained by Shiro’s side, more like a prickly burr attached to his hip that clung to the fabric of his pants and refused to let go. If he weren’t careful removing it, it would pull and pill the fibers. He cared that much, at least. It—the wolf—took him back to his room and sat its hindquarters down at his feet. He reached for the door, and the teeth, ever so gently, grabbed his wrist, his one good wrist, and whining shrilly through flared nostrils, tugged his hand away.

Fine, Shiro thought. 

_Fine._

He dressed with the creature watching, head tilted to one side while it judged or didn’t judge his lumpy physique and the way he struggled to get a shirt over the collar of his prosthetic arm. He brushed his teeth, possibly for the first time in a week. He might have needed to see a dentist, one of his molars hurt and he didn’t really see the point of taking the time to keep it clean if it was just going to be pulled anyway. He imagined it some deep, dark cesspit of spongy decay and chose not to check in the mirror in case it really was that bad. His electric shaver had not made the trip. It probably lay at the bottom of a box, still unpacked from when his husband had kicked him out.

The wolf would have to forgive him.

Only it didn't. He reached for the door again, and a cold, gritty nose pressed itself to his palm with a growl. He saw the teeth, sabers in the large mouth, felt the beast’s hot breath against his skin.

Why did this cute, fluffy alien have to look so much like a dog?

Shiro loved dogs. Someday he’d have a dog. Maybe. If he ever felt he could be responsible enough to take care of one.

It made sad eyes at him, then whined again, crossing its paws as it lay down with a huff. It smelled pleasant, a scent that reminded him of warm bread and the summer sun. A kind, social creature, and he had to admit, he liked it. Only it made him play by its rules.

His? Shiro thought Keith had called the wolf a he but couldn’t remember. Those particular memories were formed at a bad time for him, and checking alien genitalia seemed like a job for someone else.

Under the sink, he found a razor, packaged and new. The wolf's glowing golden eyes never left him as he went through the motions, and when he was done, the furry head butted against his hip, and a soft rumbling from deep within its chest emerged like a great purr of relief.

A purr?

The wolf was definitely purring.

How did it know so much about human morning rituals anyway?

_Because it lives with Keith._

Not exactly. Try again.

_Because it was there when Keith brought me back._

Not quite. His therapist had told him he needed to take responsibility for himself. C’mon, once more!

Internally, Shiro groaned.

_Because when I chose to come back from the astral plane with Keith, the wolf was there and it—he—stayed by my side, just like his master._

Inhaling and exhaling, he already felt immensely better. Dissociation was plainly and simply bad for his health. _Human ritual?_ When had he started thinking of Keith as other?

When had _that_ ever mattered?

He recalled an argument he’d once had with Curtis, one of many, but this one, in particular, had stuck with him because in anger his husband had referred to Keith as his Galra friend, a strange, prejudiced comment about something he wouldn't ever have known if he hadn't been told. And like jealousy, he recognized it now.

More human than any other person he had ever known, Keith would have died with him in that cloning facility, a decision made at the brink of eternity, as natural as the choice to wake up every morning and breathe. He'd given everything to Shiro—his life, his heart.

The wolf leaned patiently against him, its internal motor rumbling away.

So much damage through neglect. Shiro couldn't even pinpoint when exactly he'd fallen in love with Keith, but even though he had dated Adam for years and married Curtis with the desperation of someone who still thought he might collapse dead despite the scans that assured him he was healthy and strong, those loves were different. Neither better nor worse, just different. 

“How do I fix this?” he asked the wolf.

With large golden eyes, the creature looked sadly up at him. It's purring ceased, and it whined again, a soft, low whimper through its nose.

Shiro didn’t think there was a fix.

What fix is there for squandering someone’s heart, or dropping it carelessly and watching as the shards scatter like diamonds spilled across a hardwood floor, each sparkling one last time before falling irretrievably between the cracks?


	4. A Redress of Grievances

###  I.

“Lance! Come here!” Pidge gestured wildly with her free hand, face plastered to the oculus of the telescope as she twisted an adjustment knob then blindly typed commands into the console. A soft whirr of power focused the lenses on a distant point and toes pressed against the floor, she pushed back, her chair rolling aside as Lance leaned down to take a look.

Through the filtered lens, the nebula burst with color, brilliant blues and purples, shimmering in a way that resembled a familiar profile. He didn’t even have to pretend to see Allura in it.

“Kind of like 2001, huh?” Pidge mused, pushing her seat into a spin with one foot.

“2001?” he asked, pulling his face away. “That was like millennia ago.”

“Centuries,” Keith corrected, smothering a yawn.

Lance counted on his fingers. One, two. “Yeah, okay, smarty-pants.”

“That’s Pidge,” Keith clapped back.

“Some things never change,” Hunk murmured.

Pidge stopped playing in the chair and leaned as far back as she could. “Sorry, I forgot you don’t watch sci-fi.” 

“There was a book, too,” Keith amended, helpfully.

“He doesn't read.” Pidge spun herself around one full turn.

Lance heard but instead of formulating a witty comeback, he returned to the telescope, transfixed by what he saw there, again feeling the dull tingling heat in his cheeks escalate to a hard burn. In the center of Allura’s chest, where the Voltron symbol would have cut across the hard shell of her armor, spilled a golden light. Even as he watched, it dripped and oozed out, a viscous pour that dissipated into the cosmos. Tiny dark specks concentrated around it.

Something about that light seemed familiar.

Of course.

_ Quintessence. _

And he could feel it.

“It’s like her heart is bleeding,” he murmured, finally leaning back.

“It's the rift.” Pidge moved in toward the eyepiece and adjusted a monitor set into the panel, fuzzy while she focused, but gradually distilling to crystal clarity, the tear now visible for all of them as a stark white smear. With a few more keystrokes, color washed over the image, adding contrast and visual spectrum overlay that allowed them to see the mass distinctly. She zoomed in on it, watching as the quintessence continued to pour from Allura’s chest.

“What are those dark specks? It shouldn’t be static.” Hunk sat down beside Pidge, studying the visual display.

She brought the view in closer but had already begun to lose image fidelity. “Too far.” She frowned. “Let me run a scan.”

“Why would she be out here?” Lance asked, still plastered to the viewfinder.

“After everything that happened to her, don’t you think she might have just wanted to be alone?” Keith said from across the room.

Lance tore his face away from the telescope, swiveling around in his chair, wide-eyed, mouth agape. He bit back the retort on the tip of his tongue, but Keith hadn't even been looking at him.

All he could think was that Keith had confirmed what he already knew. That dust cloud or nebula or whatever, was what remained of Allura’s essence out in the universe. 

Keith leaned back against one of Pidge's equipment crates, the cosmic wolf's head in his lap. He stroked the soft spot between the creature’s eyes, staring blandly at the sky through the opened dome of the observatory.

_ It’s not always about you. He didn’t say it was  _ you.

But Lance couldn't help but take it personally as if the weight of the blame rested solely on his shoulders.

“Keith!” Shiro sighed with disbelief, rubbing his sinuses.

“Better to get it out in the open.”

“The only thing Keith’s ever treated with kid gloves, Shiro, is you,” Lance finally said. “Besides,” he turned to Keith, a dry half-smile on his lips, “I’ve always appreciated your directness.”

“Lance?” Hunk peered over his shoulder at the three of them. “Shiro, Keith, you three might want to see this.”

Pidge pulled up a read-out on her tablet then tapped the console, looking from one screen to the other. “The data still checks out. This is the same signature we found from the entity that Allura consumed.”

Keith stood up and strode over, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “You knew it would.”

Pidge nodded.

“Did you know she’d be here?” Lance finally worked up the gumption to pose the question.

“No.” Pidge stared him dead in the eyes. “But I thought she might be. And I was right.”

He knew she spoke the truth, that asking was nothing less than silly of course Pidge could only have speculated. But Allura was out there, and she was trying to tell him that. How long had he not been listening? Warm wetness filled his vision, everything blurring together until he blinked away the salty tears.

Hunk glared at them. “Stop it, Pidge. Can’t you see he’s been through enough? All of us have. She’s stardust, that’s all. It’s a broken image in a slurry of stars.”

He didn’t believe her. 

For a moment, she went back to typing, inputting commands, then sat back and waited for the console to process the data.

Logically, Lance knew Hunk could be right, but it also made little sense that Allura was there to begin with or that Pidge would find something hiding in the matrix of the universe that would lead them to an image of the one they lost.

That’s all it was, an image, an impression, and yet on the screen in front of him, a three-dimensional model of the dust clouds showed that it wasn’t just the view they had that made it look like Allura, the entire structure of the nebula was shaped like a woman.

_ You’re wrong, Hunk. _

“What can we even do?” Lance asked, straining to maintain a level tone. “We're nobody now, with no Lions and a ship that barely flies. How could we even begin to repair the damage here?” 

_ Listen to yourself! This is pointless. _

He leaned forward, pressing his fingertips across his forehead, grinding his teeth together in some weak attempt to stave off the waterworks, angry at himself for getting into this situation, this place with these people. He tried, and he continued to try, but he’d lost his best friend to time and circumstance ages ago, even as Hunk stared at him now. Pidge, immersed in her work, had surrounded herself with robots and AI to replace all the irreplaceable people. Keith, well no one had ever really known what went on there, except perhaps for Shiro. And Shiro the untouchable hero had become stuck at an impasse, unable to move forward with his life.

“Be quiet!” Keith clipped.

Lance snapped his head around to face him, startled. “You’re telling  _ me  _ to—” He stopped.

The burning in his cheeks only intensified and as he watched a golden aura shimmer around Keith, barely visible at first, it grew stronger, rippling like heat haze as it rolled off his skin and dissipated into the air. He glanced aside, Shiro's jaw had gone slack, and Pidge's eyes narrowed in studious disbelief. Hunk crossed his arms and nodded, doing his best impression of nonchalant.

Keith opened his eyes, dark, nearly indigo and so very clear. “The quintessence is just as strong as it ever was,” he whispered.

Lance suspected Keith’s quintessence bond, like his own, had never faded, but this? 

So much of it concentrated around Keith. Raising both hands, he collected the light within his cupped palms before letting it sift through his fingers. 

Lance didn’t have the energy to be irritated, and went to him, reaching out to catch the golden spill. A faint discoloration still marred Keith’s hand where he’d been burned by the druid’s magic, then healed again with quintessence.

Keith reached up to his face, fingertips skirting the marks Allura had left there. “You’re glowing.”

_ I know. _

“We’ve got to go to her.” Lance spoke in a panicked rush, licking his chapped lips and raising his face to the dusty black of the colony’s darkest night. Soon enough, cosmic dust at the edges of the Quantum Abyss would appear at the milky horizon, rising like clouds burned off of white-capped waves.

Nothing. He couldn’t see the Allura-nebula from here and went back to the telescope. The focus went out and it slowly plodded to the right, before refocusing on the tear, bleeding anima.

With a sigh, he pushed himself away.

“You’re not thinking this through,” Hunk manipulated the images from the telescope on his screen. “First of all, we need some way to close the rift. We still haven’t solved the mystery of the entities, which, I’m guessing,” he paused, taking Pidge’s tablet and simultaneously scrolled through data on both computers, “are making the static? Those dark flecks that look like ground pepper.”

“Maybe we could capture one and take it back with us,” Pidge suggested. “After we close that rift.”

“Absolutely not!” Shiro raised his voice over them to be heard but was interrupted almost immediately by Coran.

“Last time, it took the entire castle ship to close the holes torn in the fabric of space. Granted that was a different sort of…” He leaned against the side of the opened doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he stared at the image on the screen. “How big is it, exactly?”

Silence.

“Pidge?” Lance asked.

“I can’t get a decent read on radar, and I don’t entirely understand the magnification power. It’s big though. Really, really big.”

“I’m not sure we have the resources we need to deal with this. I think we’re going to have to approach the Coalition—” Shiro tried again.

“And then what?” Keith interrupted, “Let them debate it until someone decides to take matters into their own hands and make it worse? Isn’t that what happened last time? Zarkon and Honerva didn’t listen to what their data was telling them and then Alfor was blamed for the destruction of Daibazaal. That was just a planet. No. We are not going that route.”

“We have some of the top Olkari minds in their delegation, Slav’s people have a representative. Altea, Daibazaal—”

Keith rolled his eyes. “You can keep going, and I'll just say it again. There is no point if we're just going to repeat history!”

“Now Keith,” Coran stepped into the room, trying to gesture for calming with his hands. “There’s no need to be so cynical—”

“Whatever, Coran.” With that, Keith lay on his back, stuffing his jacket beneath his head as he stared at the sky, drawing out streams of quintessence from his hands, shifting and changing like a cat’s cradle as he pulled and tugged at it, still maintaining its substance even through his frustration. As if he had nothing better to do.

Lance watched, pressing his fingertips to the burning heat on his face. As he pulled his hands away, the blue light shimmered to golden quintessence in threads as fine as spider silk that stretched, floating delicately in the air, and thinning out until they disappeared. 

In awe, Hunk looked on. Pidge and Coran hadn’t seemed to notice, but Shiro looked on with a hard stare, the grim set of his lips and brows in telling pessimism.

“I wish I could still do it.” He spoke quietly, just loud enough for anyone to hear who might have been listening.

“Have you tried?” Keith asked lazily, turning his face toward Shiro.

“My connection to the Black Lion was severed. I haven’t felt quintessence since—”

“What are you talking about?” Keith sat up abruptly, not even trying to hide the strange, stricken shock on his face. “You  _ are _ the Black Lion. When the lions left, I thought for sure you’d be taken with them.”

Lance watched Shiro’s jaw drop.

“You—what?”

“Nevermind.” Keith waved a hand, dismissing his own comment.

Lance wished he could have asked, but Keith would never entertain that line of questioning in front of so many people. Even ones that might have been his friends. So, he listened instead.

Shiro’s face contorted in thought, “Once I was transferred, well, after I found myself in this body, I mean, I never felt it again.”

“You didn’t try, did you?” Keith hurled the accusation like a pitch to the opposing team, fast, hard, and to the point.

Shiro’s face bespoke the truth of those words.

“You rolled over and gave up,” Keith added, rubbing salt in the already opened wound.

In truth, Lance wanted to hear them scream at each other, but knew that was unlikely. Keith looked physically hurt by the words he had just uttered, and Shiro just took it.

“He knows,” Lance said. When Keith looked at him, he shrugged. “Shiro knows.”

Disgusted, Keith rolled his eyes and huffed, drawing the quintessence out between his hands, spreading his fingers wide so that it hung like frosted garlands and then he slapped his palms together, rolling it into a ball, and hurled it across the room at Shiro.

With electric reflexes, Shiro caught it with his left hand. Uncurling his fingers, he stared at the golden blob and watched as it melded into his palm disappearing completely. He rubbed his hands together, wiped his left hand on his shirt, staring at the fabric for any trace of quintessence.

Beside Lance, Pidge drew spikes of quintessence out between steepled fingers, lightly tapping them together as she sent the golden sparks into the air. Droplets of it dotted Hunk’s face and hands, lifting off his flesh and melding into his budding aura.

Shiro shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You’re going to have to,” Lance replied, unsure where the response had come from. “We’re not leaving this section of the universe until we’re able to at least take a closer look. I’m not leaving, at least.”

Pidge backed him up. “If we can do something, anything, we should try.”

“Agreed,” Keith said.

“This has got to be the worst episode of the Voltron Show.” Hunk laughed.

“Are you making fun of my legacy, dear boy?” Coran eyes him, brow raised, “Let me tell you, the success of the current Galactic Coalition would be nothing without our intervention in its earliest conception.”

“Yeah. Sure. You know, it’s called ‘propaganda,’ Coran.” Hunk made a ball of quintessence and with a grin, pitched it fast in his direction.

“Aw yeah! Quintessence fight!” Pidge yelled, leaping from her chair and flipping it over to use as cover. “Hunk’s on my team!”

Lance made a split-second assessment of his options. With Shiro being a lump, Keith a party pooper, and Romelle probably asleep, that left one other person, one who couldn't use quintessence, but whose athletic prowess remained unparalleled and whose reflexes, well, no one ever gave Coran enough credit. “I’ve got Co-ran!” Lance drawled, racing across the room. He grabbed the breakfast tray still sitting on a crate from that morning and passed it off to his partner, half-sliding, half-pivoting a full 180 into position.

"Ha!" Coran smacked the floor with the end of the tray, lunging forward, ready to assume his role as defense.

Keith rolled over to face the wall. “Have fun.”

“You can’t be serious?” Shiro looked from Team Pidge and Hunk to Team Lance and Coran.

“You are in the war zone, Admiral,” Coran yelled as Lance slammed Shiro right in the chest with a ball of pure, golden quintessence.

Shiro groaned and flopped over like a beached whale in the middle of the observatory floor.

A smaller shot of the stuff splattered against the tray as Coran expertly blocked.

“Think you’re fast, huh?” Pidge screamed, grinning from ear to ear before she and Hunk bumped fists and hurled two more directly at them. Lance barely dodged the first and Coran took the other in the legs.

The observatory filled with a quintessence haze as they continued. Keith lay back and watched it overhead until Lance decided he couldn’t stand it anymore. It would be more fun if Keith joined them anyway, and prompting Pidge and Hunk, the three of them converged upon him in an explosive spray of glittering golden light.

"Oh, you've asked for it," Keith glowered, wrenching himself up from his position and shaking out his quintessence soaked hair as he leapt behind the crates that had held Pidge's equipment, kicking them together to erect a makeshift barricade. Peering above the wall, he lobbed successive globes at Lance and Coran, and preparing to launch a third as a blue crystalline shield formed to protect his open side from Pidge and Hunk.

“Whoa!” Pidge stopped. “Where did that come from.

She took a spatter of gold from Lance, the dust clinging to her glasses. She took them off and blinked, still staring at Keith.

He looked at the shield. “We spent an awful lot of time practicing this.”

“Where did you think it came from?” Coran added. “The suits and the bayards might have helped channel the energy, but you still had to make it yourselves.”

“Like flying the Lions.”

“Or,” Keith paused, staring at Shiro. “Bringing someone into the Lion when there was no other way to reach them.”

“It’s not the body that’s capable or not, it’s the mind. The Lions only choose pilots they know they can connect with,” Coran said.

“This mind can’t do that anymore.” Shiro spat, getting to his feet. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine,” Keith muttered, hurling a curving ball of energy right at Shiro’s head, spattering him in an explosion of shimmering dust.

A flash of anger colored Shiro’s face and then disappeared, his lip twitched and curled, and he dug in, crouching low. He screamed then, a torturous, guttural sound that escaped his lungs. His own shield came fortified with jolts of electric light that fizzled and sparked off the surface, connected to his prosthetic arm, and in his free left hand, the golden light began to amass, siphoned to him with the strength of his own energy.

It landed with an explosive crack against Keith’s shield, showering the room in a blazing glow. Shiro heaved, sweating from the exertion, but already pulling together a second round from the air, the ground, everything around him, culminating in that frenetic burst. Lance held his breath. Pidge and Hunk fell silent. Coran huddled awkwardly behind the breakfast tray.

Keith’s surprise broke into laughter.

And then Shiro laughed too.

###  II.

Keith approached the rift cautiously. As soon as he felt the slightest change in gravitational pull, he engaged the thrusters and backed off.

Lance tapped his fingers against the console, knee bouncing either from nerves or because he needed to take a piss. Possibly both. “Why’d you stop?” He looked at his panel and tried to access the Arcus’ controls but couldn’t. “C’mon, Keith!”

“I’m not taking this piece of junk any closer, and neither are you.”

In the distance, they watched the quintessence seep out like honey from the wound, a slow drip collecting and then cascading into a river that dissipated even before it reached them

Near the mouth of the rift, violent sparks of purple light exploded and fizzled out, their dark centers drifting into the quintessence field, swallowed whole by its overwhelming light. Sometimes, however, one would instead arc upward in a spray like electric lights, their violet centers pulsating with life. Like malignant tumors, they clustered together, huddling above the quintessence that would either give them life or take it from them.

“Intelligent life with whom we have no means of communication. They have no mouths, they make no noise that we can hear or detect.” Pidge stared up at them through the shield above the console.

“They’re an infection,” Coran said.

Lance growled, slamming his fist into the panel in front of him, squeezing his eyes shut. “She should never have taken that thing inside herself! What was she even thinking?”

“She thought she could control it,” Romelle whispered. “She thought she knew what she was doing.”

The Arcus lurched forward, and the radio beeped as Hunk patched in from the engine room. “Hey, what's going on up there? I'm having trouble keeping the core steady. Drive keeps fluctuating.” It bucked again. “Keith?”

Keith grabbed the steering, but it refused to budge. “Hunk? I wasn’t touching it. Gonna try to take us farther out.” The ship began to pull steadily forward. Slowly at first, then picked up speed.

Keith jostled the steering and scanned the panel.

“Keith! What are you doing?” Lance raised his voice, the spill of quintessence growing closer.

“Nothing!”

_ Don’t panic. _

Shiro spoke up from behind him. “Hunk, divert as much power as you can to thrust.”

Shaking his head, Keith said nothing. It had stopped responding to him altogether.

Pidge sucked in her breath as her console went dark, followed by Keith’s, then Lance’s, each light flickering out, one after another.

Romelle shrieked as the overhead lights flickered and dimmed.

“Everything’s going offline, Keith. I ca—” the outage cut Hunk off.

“HUNK!” he yelled, twisting around and unsnapping his harness, vacated his seat. Shiro frantically searched the display in front of his chair, still glowing with life. “Do you have an override?” Keith asked, reaching him in two long strides

“I’m trying to find one,” he answered just as his panels went dark and the last faint light inside the bridge gave its last heaving breath.

The ship creaked and groaned under the invisible force that held it. Doors slammed and footsteps pounded up the stairs and through the narrow corridor as Hunk burst breathlessly into the bridge. “The auxiliary power cores aren't coming online. They're brand new, they shouldn't be dead! We tested them multiple times before we even left Earth. Backup generator's out, batteries. I think I want to try— What's going on?”

He stared out past Keith’s shoulder.

“Oh no, no-no-no-no-no-hoooo boy. We’re gonna die.”

Keith pivoted around and froze, breathless. Golden spews of cosmic dust fell over their dying craft, sparkling like desert sand against the windshield. It reminded him of home and his father and Shiro and so many things he couldn’t think about right now. The light escaping from the rift reached inside the ship provided them just enough illumination to see. The ship hawed and heaved again, something shifted in the cargo hold below, crashing against the hull from the inside as it pulled them faster toward the great gaping maw of overflowing quintessence.

Dollops of black and violet energy hit splattered the windshield, only a few at first, but the closer they drew to the hole in the sky, the more that came rushing toward them, sticking like exploded insects to the glass.

Vaulting back into his seat, Keith spun himself into position and grabbed the steering once more. "Come on!" he whispered, more to himself than the controls, but this was no Lion. It had no preference for working with him or without, but it was covered in quintessence, and he could use that.

Maybe.

He tried to clear his mind, but the anxious and frightened echoes of his comrades haunted his mindscape.

“What’s he think he’s doing?”

“We’ve got to get the Arcus back online!”

“I know that Hunk, do you have any suggestions, ‘cause I’m flat out.”

“Quiet everyone, one at a time. We need to think this through.”

“Now, Shiro? Now? When we’re on a collision course with destiny? The only reason we could go in and out before was Voltron. Voltron is gone!”

_ Don’t listen! _

He couldn’t help it. Their words came through the garbled noises of the dead cutter. Things clunking around with shifts of pitch and yaw. The simulated gravity had gone out,  _ again, _ and unharnessed, he floated weightless inches above his chair.

While everything spilled out, it drew them in like the singularity of a supermassive black hole. They might just fall through the center.

He shut his eyes, inhaling and exhaling measured breaths to the mantra of patience and focus, closing off the voices and other outside noise. He grabbed the steering and tried to wrest control of the ship. It had worked once before, but that was a different time, inside the Black Lion with Shiro at the helm. He had done that out of love, a love that time had turned and twisted into bitter anger, one only just beginning to soften into an acute sadness. This was harder.

The energy burned his hands in a way that made him sweat, his knuckles straining as the steering shook and his palms slipped over the handlebars.

He wanted to destroy the whole thing, douse it in fuel and watch it burn—the good with the bad and the sludge of entities dragging their vessel along. He squinted through their bodies, like amoeboid goo leaving strings of sludgy energy over their view. Keith screamed with every last bit of rage left to him, grabbing Lance and Pidge, each by the hand, buffering himself with his own quintessence, combining it with theirs. Something slammed against the back of his chair, and he felt the powerful grip of Shiro's prosthetic over his shoulder, fingertips digging into the space beneath his clavicle. The bridge door crashed open, and moments later Hunk's warm palm met his other shoulder. Energy amassed around them, a lightning storm filling the cabin and arcing from one end to the other like St. Elmo’s fire through the clouds.

“Romelle!” Coran yelled.

From the corner of his eye, Keith saw her leap from the captain’s pedestal to Coran’s side.

“Whatever happens next, don't let go!” Keith screamed above the noise of their small spacecraft straining against the forces of the rift. It was not Voltron, it wouldn't be able to withstand the same kind of stress, and even if they survived this rending, it seemed unlikely the old ship would make a return trip.

Better not to think on that yet.

Everywhere noise, the grunts and surprised utterances of his teammates, sudden intakes of breath and the shock of realizing they were still breathing. The vacuum of space hadn’t penetrated the magic of their quintessence, or perhaps they had become magic themselves, organic beings from a tiny blue planet that protected them from all the inhospitable features of the universe. Through the mouth of the fissure, yellow light surrounded them, a deep golden reflectance from swirling clouds of quintessence. A swarm of the strange entities flew toward them, even as their ship melted away and they hung suspended.

A dark shadow roiled behind the swarming mass, and once it had passed, another wave bore upon them. Keith turned his face away but felt Lance's grip upon his wrist tighten.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh-shhhh,” he hissed, straining forward and pulling them all along with him. “Listen.”

The mass at the center expelled an anguished cry, still moving in and out of itself, folding inward and spiraling upward as if it had life or a heart that beat at its tumultuous core.

“Allura?” Lance called, dragging them toward it with the sheer force of his will. “Allura!” he tried again.

And the rage that seemed to feed on its own dark flames paused, drawing itself in, creating a silhouette as familiar as it was strange. The form of the woman emerged from it, stepping out as she peered at them, a hard, unblinking stare as her inner light burned off the negative energy for just a moment before it consumed her again.

They moved toward her as one. Each tiny entity that hit their quintessence field fizzled out in flames of prismatic light until they reached the plane where Allura or the form that had taken on her likeness stood against the darkness and fought it in a continuous battle. They surrounded her with their aura, floating in a protective circle as Lance walked toward the thing that might have been Allura, reaching into the humming density of the entities, his hands and arms disappearing as the blackness swallowed them up.

“Allura,” he cried, the light on his face intensifying white-hot and suddenly shooting across his flesh with the organic circuitry of veins, down his neck, disappearing beneath his plain shirt and jacket, reappearing at his rolled-up sleeves and leading his hands into the hive of entities.

He started to pull her out, her eyes a dull gray, hollow in her gaunt face and her ashen skin, stretched taut over her bones.

Coran gasped and tried to break free, but Shiro and Romelle held him back.

The entities surged from her and Keith closed the gap between himself and Hunk, pulling them all in, killing the dark energy as he struggled to keep them together. He dared a glimpse around the circle, all of them stretching the limitations of what they believed they could do. Pidge let it flow through her, blank contentment plastered over her features, Hunk taking it in, the ebullient glow of life, Coran and Romelle conduits, their facial marking alive with the potency of their magic. Shiro shook with shuddering strength, giving everything he had and did not have.

Allura looked up at Lance even as she fell forward. He caught her, the entities moving quickly to cover her again, but she held them off.

“You came for me,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“It was wrong,” Lance’s voice cracked even as he struggled to speak through the forces of quintessence and Altean magic. “We were wrong to leave you here alone.”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“Honerva,” Keith said, his tone harsher than he’d meant it to be.

“She’s gone,” Allura said, voicing the answer to the unasked question. She arched her back, pained from her struggle against the entities.

They seemed to grow around her, at her feet, climbing up her legs, her stomach, reaching up to her shoulders and not even their quintessence could rid her of them.

Allura continued. “Honerva was so consumed by hatred and self-pity she didn’t last past the re-set.”

“Re-set? What do you mean, re-set?” Keith asked, his hold on the quintessence slipping, wishing he’d even once tried harder to use that bond. It wasn’t just feeling the Lion, it was a means of connecting to the world. Here it served as a force field, a weapon, and a shield.

_ Re-set. _

“We re-set as close to where we’d left it as we could, so you wouldn’t be missing time or…” she trailed off.

“You,” Lance replied. “So we wouldn't be missing you. But I've missed you at every turn of night to day—”

“There isn’t a moment that goes by I don’t think of how I’ve failed you,” Coran added.

“Where I don’t wonder where you are,” said Pidge.

“Or if you still remember us?” Hunk admitted.

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you and yet I couldn’t do the same for you,” Shiro said. 

“I just miss my friend.” Romelle looked up at her. “We knew each other for such a short time and yet that time meant so much to me.” 

_ Time. _

_ Time. _

_ Time. _

“Let me—let us take you home.” Lance pulled her forward, but her legs and feet held fast, still surrounded by the black entities.

“I can’t. I’m part of this—this whole thing—the universe—all of it will just fall apart again!”

“Then we have to fix it.” Lance cried.

“How do we do that? We’re—” Hunk paused mid-sentence and looked at his companions.

Allura finally pulled one knee from the diminishing mass of entities surrounding her, a tiny flame lit anew in her eyes. She stared at him. “We close the rift.”

“You mean?” Pidge asked, afraid to voice the whole thought.

“I left it open because I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone.”

“You’re not alone anymore.” Keith said, breaking the circle as Lance finally pulled her free. Color flushed in her cheeks, and she only paused to gain her footing before taking her place in their ring.

It had taken them too long to learn this lesson, and maybe they would perish trying to mend this one more time, but at least they’d do it together.

The quintessence in the field surged in and out of their bodies, focal points to hone and shape and use it, the brilliant light burning off the last of the entities residing in this interstitial space.

They focused on the rift, led by Allura, feeding her the energy and the power she needed to finally repair the torn fabric of reality, weaving the frayed and torn edges together stronger than they had been before, closing the gap until the blackness of space consumed them.

###  III.

The glass-covered pod obscured the world in its haze, but even through the dense air of the healing cycle, he could make out a recognizable face. Dark eyes in a pale face framed with unkempt hair and the uniform. Standard issue paladin armor. Red. Red like the fury of the sun, the searing images of everything he had just seen burned into his vision when he closed his eyes. 

The airlock hissed and recalibrated, a damp mist fogging up the glass before the barrier lifted.

Shiro hadn’t been dreaming.

Keith stood right there, leaning over the healing pod, wide-eyed shock draining the color from his face. He blinked.

“Keith! I was dreaming. Keith… I—I let you go.” Shiro whispered, his voice shattering, unable to control it, unable to speak about the terrible dream. Keith seemed different, the old scar on his cheek red and angry. So much red. Shiro started to shake, and Keith leaned in. Eyes searching and lips parted, he hesitated as if he wanted to say something but suddenly changed his mind before slipping his chin over Shiro’s shoulder and squeezing tight.

“It’s okay. You’re okay now. You’re safe. We’re okay.  _ We’ll _ be okay.” Breathless, Keith spoke the words as if for them both, as if he needed to convince himself of its truth.

_ As many times as it takes. _

Keith helped Shiro up, sitting beside him at the edge of the pod. Visions swam through his mind, memories so visceral they couldn’t have been visions from the transreality rift. He tried to ignore them but found himself drawn inside this fake life he'd led, marriage to someone he didn't recognize, but he definitely did. The man's name was right at the tip of his tongue, but he lost it.

While he tried to reorient and sort it out, Keith slipped a hand inside his, lacing their fingers tight and pressing against his side as if afraid to let him go.

“So this is where it sent us,” Pidge wondered aloud, but Shiro barely heard her.

_ Curtis. He’s going to kill me. I never signed the divorce papers. _

Yet this was neither that time nor that place.

“You came back for me,” Allura said, teeth chattering as she unknowingly began to answer Shiro's unasked questions.

Lance wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, easing her down and pulling her close, even as she collapsed, head in hands with a sob.

“It wasn’t right. None of it.” Lance spoke, his voice cracking with emotion he struggled to contain.

_ It wasn’t a dream. _

Shiro glanced around the room, recognizing it but still unable to place the location. He twisted around, leaning on his arm, but hardly any of it remained. The Galra limb had overtaken his entire shoulder, the nerves numbed entirely burned out. This was after the cloning facility.

_ The cloning facility. _

He no longer had just one other personality lingering at the back of his head, but a second as well, the one that had lived another life going forward. Looking around the room, they all seemed to share the silent memory of that reality.

Shiro knew there was no place he’d rather be, that in returning to this body, he had made the right decision. 

How often was anyone given a second chance?

Allura cried silently into Lance, Coran at her other side now, rubbing her back, murmuring there-theres, the relief of seeing her again making up for all the lost goodbyes.

Hunk and Romelle were nowhere to be seen, but the wolf, slightly smaller, perched upon a stack of crates behind him, beside the Galra woman leaning against them, long legs crossed as she casually stroked its thick mane of fur. Krolia. She smiled softly at Shiro and her son.

Hunk appeared with a cart from the kitchen—the Black Lion’s kitchen—with Romelle in tow.

“Shiro! When did you wake up?” Hunk asked, offering him a mug of something piping hot, the steam curling up from the surface of the beverage in white wisps.

Shiro looked at his hand, locked with Keith’s and shook his head.

“Just a moment ago,” Krolia answered for him.

“Do you— I mean, are you—”

Shiro nodded in answer to the unspoken question, then followed it with a “Yeah.”

“We went about this all wrong the last time,” Keith said. 

“Last time?” Krolia narrowed her eyes, brow raised in question, and the wolf lifted a paw to her mouth with a soft whine. She frowned, clearly the only one out of the loop.

“Don’t worry about it,” Keith said then turned to Allura. “Why did you pick this place?”

She sniffled. “It’s the perfect place to start again. Don’t you think?”

After a moment, Keith nodded silently and glanced at Shiro.

He allowed himself to breathe and squeezed Keith’s hand.

“What do you suggest we do first, then? Sendak is already at Earth, but Haggar—” Keith began.

Allura interrupted him. “First, we retrieve Lotor. I think he’s stewed in quintessence long enough, and I think this time, we have the strength to control him. Not to mention, we’ll need his help where his mother is concerned.”

“Oh come on!” Lance’s exasperation lingered in the air, with just a hint of jealousy. “I thought we were done with that guy!”

Allura touched his arm, sliding her fingertips down to his hand and slotted her fingers between each of his. “Trust me, Lance. This is a better way. Let him stop his mother before she turns him into her puppet and let us all stop her before we lose everything. Again.”

“It wasn’t so terrible.” Pidge joked, scratching her head. “Lance went off to farm, Keith ran away to… run away, Shiro languished in filth and stale cheese puffs when Curtains finally realized he’s a complete disaster of a human being.” She heaved herself up onto a crate on the other side of the cosmic wolf and hugged it. “Hunk seemed unfulfilled—I guess getting stuck in the kitchen takes the ambassador part out of the cooking. You were dead. Okay, no. On second thought, it was pretty bad.”

“Is that what you saw in the Quantum Abyss?” Krolia asked.

Keith turned to look at her and shook his head. “No. We lived it.”

“It’s so cold in space,” Allura murmured. “Just emptiness and blackness forever and ever. Most of space is empty, you know.”

“Most of an atom is empty too,” Hunk said, “But bring a bunch of them together and structure emerges. It means something then.”

“As Allura said once before,” Shiro started, for the first time in a long time feeling glad to be back. “We are always stronger together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know that feeling when you just have to get something out of your system? That was this. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


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